Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we looked at election polls as an example of the challenges involved in defining and handling misinformation. We noted how Trumpland seemed to have entirely forgotten about its own manufactured TikTok hysteria, at which point the Commerce Department suddenly remembered it was supposed to ban the app. Following Trump’s election loss, there was pressure on Ajit Pai to call off his dumb attack on social media since he was guaranteed to lose his position, while the Trump campaign got laughed out of court for its ridiculous “evidence” of voter fraud.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we wrote about why Hollywood, Big Pharma, and Wall Street were all such fans of the TPP. A court rejected the MPAA’s plan for a new Secret SOPA, the head of the House Judiciary Committee was getting cozy with the MPAA boss, Blizzard was once again trying to twist copyright law to go after bot-makers, and in the wake of a ruling on Happy Birthday a charity popped up claiming it owned the copyright. Meanwhile, a judge once again said the NSA’s phone records program was unconstitutional, only to have his ruling quickly stayed by the appeals court.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, we wrote about a paper that covered hip-hop as a case study of how copyright law can’t handle remix culture. In the wake of the Limewire shutdown, alternatives popped up almost immediately (because of course they did), somewhat ironically leading Limewire to complain about unauthorized versions of Limewire. The Patent Office made it harder to reject patents for obviousness, MIT’s Tech Review came out in favor of patent trolls, and Microsoft and Motorola got into a patent nuclear war. Also, for a bit of history posting inside the history post, here’s what we wrote about the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee proposing the web (which means we’ve now passed the 35th anniversary!)

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