This Week In Techdirt History: October 27th – November 2nd

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, Comcast was putting on an innocent act regarding consumer privacy, while we looked at one Idaho town that was doing broadband competition right. India was looking to get into the mass facial recognition game, while NBC was facing legal threats for reporting on a company’s facial recognition tech being used against Palestinians. We wrote about the content moderation challenges around vaccines (which would soon, of course, become a much bigger topic), and our FOIA lawsuit against ICE yielded an admission about their domain seizures. We also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the internet.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, a ruling in the EU Court of Justice said that embedding is not infringing, while Spain passed a new copyright law demanding payments for snippets and links, and The New Yorker published a long feature on the ridiculous state of copyright law. Stefan Molyneux was sued for abusing the DMCA, while the EFF published rankings of service providers based on how well they stood up to copyright and trademark bullies. Comcast and Verizon agreed to pay millions to settle claims of overbilling, and the MPAA and movie theaters were freaking out about Google Glass. And we also learned more about how the UK’s GCHQ could get warrantless access to bulk NSA data.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, Google was embroiled in various legal fights: explaining in court why it shut down someone’s Gmail over a missent email, dealing with a criminal copyright investigation in Germany over YouTube, and getting sued over patents on open source code. Warner Bros. shut down a Harry Potter themed dinner for infringement, while NPR was the latest to join the bogus DMCA takedown brigade, just in time for the EFF to launch its takedown hall of shame. Also, this was the week that Geocities went offline.