This Week In Techdirt History: May 22nd – 28th

from the as-it-ever-was dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2017, the FCC was still working hard to ignore support for net neutrality and also ignore how fake much of the opposition was, while Apple and Verizon were joining forces to lobby against the right to repair. We learned more about how little it takes to be branded a threat to the FBI, and how ICE was suing Stingrays to track down immigrants, while the DOJ was expressing an interest in prosecuting leakers and whistleblowers. This was also the week that the Supreme Court dealt a blow to East Texas by shutting the door on patent jurisdiction shopping.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2012, the Supreme Court allowed the Tenenbaum charade to continue by refusing to hear the case, and also ordered a reconsideration of “on the internet” software patents. The judge in the Grooveshark lawsuit ordered Digital Music News to preserve logs that had already been deleted, and an appeals court in Russia said the social network vKontakte was liable for file sharing by users. But the biggest ruling came in the Google/Oracle patent case, with a jury saying there was no patent infrongement by Google.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2007, Facebook was trying to position itself as an open platform for others to build on. The spam wars were tapering off but not because of victory against spam, rather because people were coming to terms with it. Japan was looking into compulsory licenses for putting TV content online, while CNN was giving up on its ill-fated online video service. And the EFF succeeded in putting an end to the spate of DMCA takedowns against videos of people dancing the Electric Slide.

Filed Under: history, look back