This Week In Techdirt History: February 16th – 22nd

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the fight around Section 230 was heating up with Mark Zuckerberg suggesting it should go away, Tom Wheeler disappointingly getting it all wrong, and the News Media Alliance coming out against it, while Ron Wyden stepped up to explain why modifying it would give more censorship power to Trump. We also featured a lengthy two part guest post about a DOJ Section 230 workshop. Meanwhile, Devin Nunes’ lawyer was continuing to use unrelated cases to try to fish for info, Comcast and AT&T were suing Maine over a privacy law, and we looked at an amusing attempt to demonstrate the problems with music copyright by putting every possible melody in the public domain.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we got a chance to look closely at Obama’s stance on encryption, while Tim Cook was making it clear that he had no interest in giving the government any backdoors to iOS. Then we learned about how the NSA hacked most hard drives and SIM cards, and looked at how its ability to steal keys to phone encryption demonstrated why backdoors are such a bad idea. Meanwhile, a nominee for Attorney General tapdanced around questions about Aaron Swartz, John Oliver did a segment about the ridiculousness of corporate sovereignty provisions, and a new company was trying to get in on the copyright trolling business.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, a court in the UK found that simply linking to infringing videos is not infringement, while the Digital Britain Minister was claiming that nobody is creative if they don’t earn money, and Universal Music got a new CEO who thought CDs were the future. There was a copyright fight in Germany over Beyonce’s bikini, and EMI decided to repeat the Grey Album disaster and go after a Wu Tang/Beatles mashup album. We also published our comments to the USTR on the Special 301 Report, while EFF and Public Knowledge teamed up to ask the USTR to change the process and stop taking industry lobbyists at their word.