This Week In Techdirt History: January 17th - 23rd

Five Years Ago

There was lots of grappling over censorship this week in 2011. While the European Commission was planning draconian new "anti-piracy" laws, the head of the ICE was defending the recent domain seizures and getting some distressing support from a wide variety of companies (Senator Ron Wyden, at least, called these companies out for supporting censorship). We also learned more worrisome details about the settlement over the unauthorized Catcher In The Rye sequel, saw Zynga start turning into a trademark bully, and watched as Righthaven started suing message board posters in its ongoing crusade.

Also of note this week in 2011: the world was learning the fascinating details of the Stuxnet worm, and the FCC gave the okay to the Comcast/NBC Universal merger.

Ten Years Ago

Five years earlier in 2006, similar censorship battles were still unfolding. One big question (that has never been entirely solved) was simply that of jurisdictions online. Major League Baseball was fighting to claim ownership of facts, and the organizers of the 2012 London Olympics were getting an extreme head start — which is what you need when your plan is to rewrite the host country's laws to give you special censorship powers. And speaking of bold legislative changes, Hollywood made an amusing and telling attempt to explicitly preserve the past by protecting "customary historic use of broadcast content by consumers". That's what happens when an industry fears innovation — that, and theaters boycotting a film because it will be released on DVD at the same time.

Fifteen Years Ago

Last week, we talked about the hype over what would eventually turn out to be the Segway — and by this week in 2001, the inventor was already struggling to manage expectations. Other hypes, such as that around online dating and the wireless web, were also disappointing people. Affiliate programs were losing some steam too, with both Google and the Wall Street Journal ditching theirs. The FBI was decidedly not immune to the hype of some script kiddies in a chat room, and the people behind famous the almost (and might-as-well-have-been) vaporware Duke Nukem game were so eager to exercise control over their hype that they went intellectual property crazy.

Thirty-Five Years Ago

Since we're venturing back through time, how about a nod to one of the most famous vessels for that very task? It was on January 21st, 1981 that the first iconic DeLorean DMC-12 rolled off the line in Belfast.