This Week In Techdirt History: June 22nd – 28th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we published our popular reference post on all the ways people are wrong about Section 230. It was needed because, as we covered in that week’s episode of the podcast, there were a whole lot of attacks on the law, most notably from some of the provisions of the overall-terrible EARN IT Act (which the Senate quickly followed up with another bill declaring all-out war on encryption). Not to be out done, Senator Brian Schatz introduced his own attack on Section 230, followed soon after by yet another attack by Senator Kelly Loeffler. But we also saw a good court ruling on 230, as a judge sided with Twitter in one of Devin Nunes’s lawsuits.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2015, the UK High Court stripped away the short-lived private copying right at the behest of the recording industry, while UK officials were seeking to weaken the country’s freedom of information law. Russia blocked the Wayback Machine over a single page, while Wikileaks revealed that the NSA had been spying on French presidents, and we noted some interesting details about the leak. We also learned that Google had been gagged for four years from talking about fighting the DOJ Wikileaks investigation, and we looked at the ridiculous redactions the DOJ required to try to hide the details of the gag order. We also saw the filing of the first net neutrality complaint, which was both stupid and important.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2010, there was a landmark legal victory when the court ruled in favor of YouTube in its dispute with Viacom, though Viacom was seriously in denial about the loss, and we wondered what the actual impact of the ruling would be. BPI seemed to be trying to set up Google for another copyright lawsuit, while new research showed yet again how weaker copyright has benefited culture and society. We wrote about how the lack of satire coverage in fair use leads to the stifling of speech, and put together a timeline of how the entertainment industry made the issue of file sharing much worse for itself.