This Week In Techdirt History: December 11th – 17th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the NY Attorney General found that two million fake comments flooded the FCC’s call for feedback on net neutrality, while two separate studies found that the fakes made up the majority of comments supportive of the repeal, all while Ajit Pai was making a tone-deaf “joke” about being a Verizon puppet at an industry gala. Pai was also falsely claiming that net neutrality hurts small ISPs although this was contradicted by the agency’s own data, while the agency was insulting everyone’s intelligence by misrepresenting broadband investment, and a leaked email showed that even the FCC’s own CTO thought that gutting net neutrality harms the public.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, France’s Hadopi scheme was gutted in favor of other bad ideas, DMCA takedowns were skyrocketing following the failure of SOPA (with notices to Google alone increasing tenfold in just six months), and we got a good example of DMCA abuse with one company issuing takedowns over comment spam with a claim of “URL copyright”. Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s office was lashing out at the RSC copyright report, while the entertainment industry was mourning the lost seat of Hollywood-friendly congressman Rep. Howard Berman. Meanwhile, the Prenda saga was getting more ridiculous and we looked at the case for why sanctions were deserved.

Fifteen Years Ago

Speaking of Howard Berman, this week in 2007 he was complaining that the PRO-IP bill wasn’t strong enough, even as the DOJ was coming out against it. And speaking of fake FCC comments, we got an early example of that following the comment period on the XM-Sirius merger. ISPs were catching flak for inserting their own messages into Google and using surfing data to inject ads into websites, the Canadian version of the DMCA was delayed as opposition grew, and the RIAA was (for the time being) refraining from claiming that personal use copies are illegal.