Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the DHS was going full gestapo in response to protests in Portland, then quickly expanding the tactics to other cities, starting with Chicago, and was also engaging in domestic surveillance to protect statues and monuments. We asked why the US was trying to punish hackers for accessing vaccine research, the FCC’s Ajit Pai was pretending to care about a prison telco monopoly he helped protect, and Bill Barr was celebrating a new DOJ “surge” targeting violent crime with inapplicable statistics. We also wrote a detailed breakdown of tech policy in the Trump era.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, Techdirt was among sites hit with bogus takedown requests from a German film distributor, though this wasn’t the most ridiculous takedown abuse of the week, since the geniuses representing Universal Pictures also asked Google to delist 127.0.0.1 (aka localhost). The NY Times was making false claims about ISIS and Edward Snowden, while UK police admitted to investigating journalists who covered the Snowden leaks. This was also the week that the FCC approved AT&T’s $69 billion DirecTV merger, and the week of the infamous AshleyMadison hack.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, we looked at the government’s anti-terrorism needle-in-a-haystack problem that they were only making worse. Some new patent trolls were out in force armed with ridiculous patents, with lots of companies getting sued for putting press releases online and for engaging in spam filtering. More porn companies were filing mass lawsuits against file sharers, while Canadian courts allowed Perfect 10’s lawsuit against Google to move forward. We also wrote about how weak anti-SLAPP laws don’t help anyone, and though a federal anti-SLAPP law was still a distant dream, we did at least see the Senate pass the anti-libel-tourism law to disregard foreign libel judgements that don’t align with the First Amendment.

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