This Week In Techdirt History: February 9th – 15th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz dropped a case after suing on behalf of the wrong party and trying to swap plaintiffs, while copyright troll Strike 3 got shut down by a judge and hit with $40k in legal fees. We looked at how US antitrust enforcement was clearly broken, and how the US broadband gaps were twice as bad as claimed. AT&T was pretending it wanted real net neutrality and privacy laws, and we wondered why Josh Hawley’s cures for big tech always omit big telecom. Also, we announced the winners of the second annual public domain game jam (the winners of this year’s jam are coming soon!)

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, Sega had to step in to clean up the mess caused by a content protection company making bogus ContentID claims, while Nintendo’s YouTuber affiliate plan was a bureaucratic mess of delays and control. Opponents of the FCC’s looming Title II net neutrality rules were ignoring history to make up reasons it wasn’t allowed, while Wall Street was telling the true story of whether anyone really believed net neutrality would harm broadband. Meanwhile, a magistrate judge shot down the government’s attempt to gag Yahoo indefinitely over grand jury subpoenas, while the court in Jewel v. NSA rejected the arguments from the EFF.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, Mathew Ingram presciently wondered whether news organizations would start demanding money from Facebook (as they were already increasingly going to war with news aggregators). We wrote about how ACTA was called an “executive agreement” to avoid the hassle of a treaty, and why it was still a dangerous deal even if it omitted filtering or three strikes requirements. Record labels decided to go for a third Jammie Thomas trial, an Australian court ruled that you can’t copyright facts so phone books are not protected, and the UK House of Lords had serious concerns about the Digital Economy Bill.