from the that-was-that dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee spent over five hours asking mostly pointless questions of tech CEOs, and the notion of a TikTok ban rose to prominence then started moving forward quickly. We also saw the Internet Archive’s initial response to the publisher lawsuit against it, while one Canadian publisher decided it would be a good time to go to ward against libraries in general.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, we saw some surprising criticism of the FBI’s push for encryption backdoors which then underwent some initially suspicious editorial oddities. The White House finally published an answer to the petition to pardon Edward Snowden, and we flagged a warning from Ron Wyden about the DOJ. Hollywood was ramping up its demands in the wake of the USTR getting fast track authority, a judge was asking questions about Malibu Media’s practices, and Warner Music was trying to muddy the waters around the Happy Birthday copyright. This was also the week that James Woods filed a $10 million lawsuit against a random Twitter user.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, the RIAA was defending its very expensive lawsuit tactics, ASCAP’s boss was turning down a debate with Larry Lessig and bizarrely calling it an attempt to silence him, Paramount was sending more bogus DMCA takedowns to fans who caught footage of a film shoot, and US Copyright Group was caught red-handed copying a competitor’s website. We were pleasantly surprised to see jailbreaking smartphones and noncommercial videos among the newly issued DMCA exemptions, then took a look at the things that didn’t make the cut. Also, we saw a grimly funny story of how copyright was finally destroying player piano music a century later.
