from the ’twas-ever-thus dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, while many in the media were hedging their bets and wringing their hands in their coverage of the rapidly escalating protests over the murder of George Floyd, I was proud that we ran an appropriately uncompromising take from our own Tim Cushing: Let The Motherfucker Burn. In a followup, responding to some of the reaction to that piece, Tim addressed the idea that “peaceful” demonstrations can fix the system. Later, we covered the giant mess that unfolded after the New York Times published Senator Tom Cotton’s call to use the military to respond to the protests. Unrelated to all that, this was also the week that major publishers sued the Internet Archive over their ebook lending program.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, Mitch McConnell was pushing a bunch of bad amendments to surveillance reform in order to block any good ones, but at least all of his amendments failed before the bill passed. The CIA director claimed that even debating surveillance was helping terrorists, while we wrote about how the NSA’s “cybersecurity” surveillance should be changing the debate about cybersecurity laws. The Supreme Court punted on a First Amendment question around “threatening” song lyrics on Facebook, Roca Labs’ lawyer was accused of intimidation for threatening a witness with criminal charges, and another lawyer stupidly sued the EFF for defamation because they criticized his patent, then backed down.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, a judge worryingly suggested that the AP would have won in its lawsuit against Shepard Fairey over the Obama Hope poster, a newspaper publisher defended filing a bunch of lawsuits in what would become an infamous crusade, and we examined how much the important Sony Betamax court ruling had been eroded over time. The EFF, Public Citizen, and ACLU were asking a judge to quash mass subpoenas from US Copyright Group, and Canadian politicians introduced Canada’s version of the DMCA. We also took a look at the results of Hollywood’s crusade against The Pirate Bay.
