from the that-was-that dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we learned about how the White House supposedly blocked Walmart from buying TikTok, and we asked why amidst all the fear around the site, nobody was equally worried about advertising tech and location data sales. GOP Senators released the latest stupid attempt to reform Section 230, the FISA court decided to loosen the restrictions on searching 702 collections, and Ajit Pai’s FCC was ignoring falsely inflated broadband numbers to pat itself on the back and killing rules that would have brought competition to cable boxes. We also took a look at the historic Zeran v. AOL case and what it could teach us about more recent cases.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, Getty Images did some copyright trolling around the “socially awkward penguin” meme, while one of its subsidiaries was going even further with a totally baseless copyright claim. Some anonymous plaintiffs filed a misguided lawsuit against Amazon and GoDaddy over the Ashley Madison hack, while security researcher Brian Krebs received a legal threat from a former Ashley Madison executive over allegations that they did some hacking themselves. Meanwhile, Ajit Pai was desperately trying to pretend he was right about net neutrality killing broadband investment, and we looked at a great example of the USTR’s “transparency” in taking three months to reveal the names of the chapters in the TPP.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, Righthaven’s mass lawsuit scheme found its way to a Senate candidate, and the company was demanding the domain names of sites it sued, while we responded to a ridiculous love letter to Intellectual Ventures. There were raids across Europe targeting file sharing websites, just as the Swiss Supreme Court ruled that tracking online file sharers was a violation of privacy laws, and the EU Parliament rejected ACTA. There was some rising awareness that censoring Craigslist only helps bad actors, while we wrote about the appeal of a ruling in which the court said Craigslist lost its Section 230 protections. And the ACLU took a somewhat new tack in suing Homeland Security over laptop searches at the border.
