This Week In Techdirt History: June 30th – July 6th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, the Wall Street Journal came out with an op-ed in defense of Section 230, while we wrote about implementation questions around the few good parts of the EU Copyright Directive. A California college decided to start targeting its own student newspaper with public records requests, and a Massachusetts city followed in San Francisco’s footsteps and became the second US city to ban facial recognition tech. Meanwhile, because this has been going on for a long time, Lindsey Graham was setting up a classic “think of the children!” moral panic Senate hearing.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, the other domestic surveillance shoe dropped with the revelation that the CIA and FBI were also spying on Americans’ communications, while the court told the DOJ to cough up the rest of the secret drone strike memos. The EFF shifted its position on net neutrality to support narrow action by the FCC, and filed another lawsuit against the NSA over failure to release records, while emails revealed a cozy relationship between Comcast executives and DOJ antitrust officials. Meanwhile, we looked at the fallout from the Aereo ruling and wondered if it killed the Cablevision ruling.

Fifteen Years Ago

Speaking of the Cablevision ruling, it was this week in 2009 that the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, confirming that remote DVR systems were legal for the time being. The Australian press was parroting movie industry propaganda about piracy funding terrorism, while BPI was admitting it screwed up in dealing with Napster and online music. We looked at how much money could be made with automated copyright settlement letter schemes, and some silly effects of copyright law like academics being prevented from promoting their own research or needing a license to demonstrate a legal point.