This Week In Techdirt History: May 19th – 25th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, people were jumping on the bandwagon of fearmongering about Huawei, while we pointed out that the real security threat is the internet of things. Another federal magistrate said that compelled production of passwords and biometrics violates the Fifth Amendment, ICE spent another $820,000 on cellphone cracking tools, and we filed a FOIA lawsuit against ICE. A new indictment of Julian Assange made unprecedented use of the Espionage Act over things journalists do all the time, using theories that probably meant Donald Trump violated the act too. And we followed up on the conclusion of our legal fight with Shiva Ayyadurai.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, the USA Freedom Act got watered down even more and then sent in its broken form to the Senate, while Dianne Feinstein was again denying that metadata collection counts as surveillance, Keith Alexander was arguing that they need to do even more spying in the future, and James Comey was continuing the FBI tradition of making up pretend threats. The DOJ filed some very ironic criminal charges over Chinese cyberspying, which could open up US officials to similar charges. And we learned that porn copyright troll Malibu Media was responsible for nearly 40% of all copyright lawsuits so far that year.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, we asked why Attorneys General were targeting Craigslist but not newspapers or other websites, while an odd Wall Street Journal article suggested the site’s removal of its adult services section was a problem of self-policing rather than external pressure, and Craigslist went on the offensive by suing the AG in South Carolina. A judge tossed out a frivolous copyright lawsuit over tie-dye shirts, YouTube was ordered to pay $1.6 million to ASCAP, and the Coldplay/Satriani copyright battle continued heating up. Meanwhile, the lawyer in the Tenenbaum case was getting ready to try a challenging argument that downloading is fair use.