This Week In Techdirt History: August 7th – 13th

Techdirt

from the in-memoriam dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, a lawyer renounced his participation in copyright-trolling activities and sued his former partner and clients, the creator of Kickass Torrents was trying and failing to get the criminal case against him tossed out, and Canadian telcos were losing their minds over TVAddons. Bob Murray was trying to stop the ACLU from getting involved in his lawsuit against John Oliver, but that proved to be mostly a sideshow when the federal district court sent the case back to state court. An appeals court mostly fixed a bad Section 230 ruling over publicity rights, while we launched the Section 230 Matters campaign. Also, this was the week that Disney pulled its content from Netflix and kicked the era of streaming silos into a higher gear.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, we saw a new angle of silly attacks on YouTube with the claim that the site complies with bad takedown requests just to make the requesters look bad. Amusingly, that same week, a bogus copyright claim took down the YouTube footage of the Curiosity Mars landing, spurring some deeper analysis of how ContentID fails at fair use and the public domain. Leaked documents detailed the MPAA’s plans for sock puppetry to mislead people about TVShack operator Richard O’Dwyer, the Authors Guild was seeking some insane fees for Google to be allowed to scan books, and Google was caving to Hollywood pressure and agreeing to punish sites that get lots of “valid” DMCA notices.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, people were beginning to notice just how long online criticism can stick around, many advertisers were still scared of advertising on social media sites in case they show up next to controversial content, and Wal-Mart was making some early experiments in marketing via Facebook groups. RIAA spinoff SoundExchange was caught apparently violating the rules against using its money for lobbying, Veoh got sick of waiting for a lawsuit and launched a preemptive legal strike against Universal Music, and, in tale of two ill-fated businesses, Blockbuster bought the failed movie download site Movielink from studios for a pittance.

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