This Week In Techdirt History: July 23rd – 29th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2018, a bad new bill sought to create a nationwide exception to subpoena and warrant requirements for cellphone location data, while a court in Canada was affirming that there’s still an expectation of privacy in devices being repaired by third parties, and FBI boss Chris Wray infamously called for people to nerd harder and create encryption backdoors which should be easy since “we put a man on the moon” (while a new report said that the Feds’ focus on device encryption was holding local law enforcement back). Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee was falsely claiming it stopped 90% of sex trafficking with FOSTA, the FCC confirmed that Sinclair misled the agency to try to get its megamerger approved (resulting in Trump throwing the agency under the bus), and Ajit Pai was yet again lying and claiming that net neutrality killed broadband investment.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2013, the rhetoric against Snowden was ramping up as an ex-CIA/NSA boss said he’s worse than every spy in American history. The NSA’s Keith Alexander was leaping into action to oppose Justin Amash’s amendment that would reign in the agency, which was also opposed by Obama for some very ironic reasons, and then was narrowly rejected after a partly ridiculous debate. We made sure everyone paid attention to the 217 Representatives who voted against it, including a few who bizarrely flip-flopped after voting to stop Patriot Act spying two years earlier. Meanwhile, Ron Wyden was calling out officials for actively misleading the public about surveillance, the leaders of the 9/11 Commission said the NSA had gone too far, and the DOJ failed in its attempt to delay the ACLU’s lawsuit.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2008, Universal said that it could ignore fair use when issuing DMCA takedowns, the IFPI was forcing music offline even though the copyright holder wanted it shared, Viacom ignored its promise and sent bogus takedowns to YouTube, and TorrentSpy appealed a ruling that gave the MPAA access to its emails. Hasbro sued Scrabulous, UK ISPs were moving down the slippery slope of becoming copyright cops, European IP scholars were speaking out against copyright extension, and we looked at a proposal for copyright with five-year use-it-or-lose-it terms. We also took an early look at legal questions around the creation of “fake news”.