This Week In Techdirt History: May 25th – 31st

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study “anti-conservative bias” on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated content moderation questions, and we wrote about what a mess the whole thing was. Then, Trump released a draft of an executive order about social media that was legally meaningless, and didn’t get any better in the official version. Mark Zuckerberg made some ridiculously wrong and self-serving statements about Twitter fact checking, and we explained why fact checking the president is not evidence of anti-conservative bias.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, a disappointing Supreme Court ruling sided with patent trolls, while the Obama administration filed a totally clueless argument in another case about software copyrights. A judge in Ohio was getting fed up with Malibu Media, Richard Prince’s latest art project continued pushing the boundaries of copyright law, and Cox was facing a lawsuit from Rightscorp that they called “extortionate”. The UK government was going Full Orwell with its suppression of free speech, while a UN report came out strongly in defense of encryption and anonymity online. This was also the week that Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, Lady Gaga joined the ranks of musicians who weren’t freaking out about piracy, while James Murdoch was giving confused lectures about copyright. We wondered why politicians kept using unlicensed music in their commercials, and why customs officers should be in charge of determining what counts as a copyright circumvention device. Infamous copyright trolls were out in force, with US Copyright Group threatening ISPs that refuse to cough up user names and commencing its mass lawsuit program for the producers of Hurt Locker, while ACS:Law was trying to get people who deny infringement to incriminate themselves. And one bizarre copyright fight broke out over the millennia old Tao Te Ching.