Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, we wrote about how the TikTok “deal” was a grift from the start, while the blowback from China started to arrive, though TikTok and the DOJ were still fighting it out in court (and a judge issued a preliminary injunction against the WeChat ban). The authors of Section 230 did some serious mythbusting in response to comments submitted to the FCC (and we followed up with more of our own), while Lindsey Graham announced a terrible bill that mashed up bad 230 reform with bad copyright reform, and the DOJ released its own dangerous and unconstitutional plan for revising 230. We also wrote a long piece about how Josh Hawley is a lying demagogue.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, the court in North Carolina issued a worrying decision that five-minute-old cell site location records were “historical” not “real time”, while the government was asking the Fourth Circuit to revisit its warrant requirement for such data. Donald Trump was threatening a ridiculous defamation lawsuit over an attack ad as well as bogus trademark infringement lawsuits against critics. Broadband ISP Cox was on the right side of one lawsuit and the wrong side of another, both defending against Rightscorp’s nutty DMCA lawsuit and suing Tempe, Arizona to block Google Fiber deployment. Also, PETA got involved in the dumb case of the century by suing on behalf of the monkey selfie, saying the monkey owns the copyright.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch proposed a bill for worldwide censorship of any sites the DOJ declares “pirate sites”, the MPAA was asking whether ACTA could be used to block Wikileaks, one judge said no to US Copyright Group’s mass subpoenas, and another judge was proving skeptical of Righthaven’s claims. France’s Hadopi came into action, sending thousands of notices for infringement (while a leaked report admitted they wouldn’t be reviewed for accuracy), collection societies in Austria were seeking a piracy tax on hard drives, and a smart ruling in Spain said Google was not liable for a user upload. Also, after their “victory” in getting Craigslist to shut down its adult services section, state AGs turned their attention to Backpage.

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