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

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020… oh, right. The COVID-19 pandemic dominated our coverage, as it sparked a huge variety of news: patent lawsuits to block testing that morphed into claims of royalty-free licenses that turned out to be bogus, ISPs dropping usage caps and entertainment giants embracing faster home video release windows, YouTube handing more content moderation over to machines and social media platforms overblocking in an attempt to fight misinformation, governments increasingly tracking people’s movements and ramping up domestic surveillance… the list goes on. We also wrote about how the pandemic demonstrated the usefulness of social media and how it would make privacy and encryption even more important.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, the FCC was outlining a plan to crush state protectionist broadband laws, while we wrote about how the new net neutrality rules needed strong FCC enforcement to have any impact, which of course congressional net neutrality opponents were trying to shame Tom Wheeler out of doing. Spain was getting ready to bring in software patents, while Australia was hit with its own SOPA-like site blocking legislation. One of the giants of copyright trolling was defying a court order, while another was discovering the operation wasn’t as profitable as it hoped. And pigs flew as Disney told a court about the importance of the public domain (though with many caveats).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, in earlier copyright troll news, the lawyers behind one UK operation were referred to a disciplinary tribunal, while another law firm that was spun out from that one was nevertheless ramping up its operations. We saw lawsuits over speech both big and small, with a movie producer suing Variety over a bad review and a New York accountant suing Craigslist over a negative anonymous post. The EU proposed criminalizing inducing infringement in the ACTA draft, while new leaks of the draft revealed that it would create a new global copyright organization. And we also wrote a big analysis of Google’s and Viacom’s arguments over YouTube, which included Viacom taking a lot of YouTube quotes totally out of context.