This Week In Techdirt History: August 25th – 31st
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, the Ninth Circuit was putting at least some limits on warrantless device searches at the border, while the EFF sued CBP and ICE for refusing to hand over GPS tracking device policies. The judge in one of Devin Nunes’s lawsuits asked for the identity of the famous Twitter accounts mocking him, newly released documents revealed how Backpage was helping law enforcement track down traffickers, and we highlighted a great op-ed about how gutting Section 230 harms the most marginalized.
There were also two very memorable events this week. One was the publication of Mike’s now-kinda-famous Protocols, Not Platforms paper, and the other was New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’s meltdown over being called a bedbug.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2014, we learned more about how the NSA makes its surveillance data available to domestic law enforcement, while former CIA director Michael Hayden was trying to downplay the CIA torture report, and the FISA court was twisting the Patriot Act to justify spying on Americans. A copyright-trolling lawyer was abusing the DMCA to silence critics, while a music distribution company was sending a bunch of bogus DMCAs of its own, and the fight was heating up between Lindsay Lohan and the makers of Grand Theft Auto. Also, PACER suddenly deleted a bunch of old cases, sparking a conversation about the many problems with the service and leading to a weak, nonsensical excuse.
Fifteen Years Ago
Five years earlier in the same week, we were still fresh off the recent launch of RECAP, and the federal courts were sounding the alarm about losing PACER revenue before changing their tune and saying RECAP was fine. Also this week in 2009, a Swedish court got The Pirate Bay taken down while Switzerland was trying to do the same to Google Street View, music publishers began their campaign of suing lyric sites, and we learned about the practice of copyright holders seeding their own files to find and sue downloaders. We also saw another good early Section 230 ruling, and featured an excellent interview about copyright with William Patry.