This Week In Techdirt History: June 5th – 11th

from the oh-the-memories dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the Sixth Circuit was the latest court to say real-time cellphone location tracking is not a Fourth Amendment issue, and the Supreme Court finally decided to take up the question. Tom Cotton introduced a bill to renew Section 702 surveillance forever, just as Congress was getting pretty mad at the intelligence community for failing to reveal how many Americans are being spied on. In the UK, Theresa May was blaming the internet for the London Bridge attack and introducing a regulatory plan that wouldn’t stop terrorism and might make things worse, especially since the attackers were well known to the authorities and strong encryption was not the problem. Also, amazingly, the Monkey Selfie case continued to get more and more weird.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the White House offered up a weak response to a petition against ACTA, while Hollywood was holding meetings where it still failed to understand how broad the category of “copyright stakeholders” is. It was also around this time that the trend of Hollywood bending over backwards to appease China was gaining steam. Meanwhile, China increased the fines for copyright infringement, the Obama administration defended the insane penalties in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case, Germany ramped up its copyright levees on solid state media, and Eric Holder was failing to explain why the DOJ censored a hip-hop blog.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, we took a look at the growing market for the sale of discovered security vulnerabilities. More people were noticing how “free trade” was often a mask for content industry protectionism, Canada got a new anti-camcording bill, and a court taught Carol Burnett a lesson about parody in her lawsuit against the producers of Family Guy. Also, courts were starting to realize that lifetime internet bans were unreasonable penalties.

Filed Under: history, look back