This Week In Techdirt History: April 21st – 27th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, another attempt to hold Twitter responsible for terrorist attacks was tossed out of court (but it didn’t stop the trend of rushing to blame social media for every tragedy) while we got a look behind the scenes of how Facebook dealt with the Christchurch shooting. Another Hollywood company filed a takedown against TorrentFreak, the Oscars declined to ban Netflix despite whining from Spielberg, and NBC Universal was clashing with Emilio Estevez over public domain footage. We also saw a very silly copyright fight over banana costumes.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, a Homeland Security advisor was warning parents that mouthing off is a sign a teenager might become a terrorist, while James Clapper was begging students to stop seeing Ed Snowden as a hero, and the DOJ was complaining about needing a warrant to search a mobile phone. We looked at the sense of entitlement among copyright maximalists, while the Supreme Court heard the oral arguments in the Aereo case, and we pointed out how people were treating the company’s adherence to copyright law as if it was a circumvention of copyright law. And, in a prime example of the revolving door, the MPAA hired the chief USTR negotiator behind the IP chapters in ACTA and the TPP.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, we wrote about why Google never should have caved on book scanning, while journalists were demanding it also cave on paying newspapers. BT began blocking access to The Pirate Bay, which mostly just further boosted the profile of the site, while some journalists were finally realizing that it’s just a search engine. A file sharing admin in Spain was sent to jail despite not breaking the law, the EU approved a copyright term extension, and the Real DVD copying case was off to an inauspicious start. Also, an era of internet history came to an end with Yahoo announcing that it would be shutting down GeoCities.