from the happy-new-year(s) dept

This Week In Techdirt History: January 4th – 10th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2021, 60 Minutes aired some pure misleading moral panic about Section 230, while Parler (remember Parler?) was desperately seeking attention by pretending it didn’t need Section 230, and Ajit Pai grew a last-minute backbone and refused to move forward with Trump’s 230 attack. Lawmakers were complaining about Comcast’s expanded usage caps while AT&T was bringing its own caps back after temporarily suspending them due to COVID. But surely the most notable event was the January 6th attack on the Capitol building, which we wrote about at length and which also led to Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump from the platform.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2016, Homeland Security admitted that it seized a hip-hop blog for five years despite no evidence of infringement, the Authors Guild predictably asked the Supreme Court to overturn the fair use ruling on Google Books, and the US Copyright Office was asking for public comments on the DMCA’s notice and takedown procedures. Richard Prince was finally sued (again) for copyright infringement over his “Instagram” art piece, while a skeptical judge gave PETA a second chance to make its nutty argument about copyright in the infamous monkey selfie. And we wrote about how the TPP was explicitly tossing out public interest in favor of corporate interests.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2011, the new congressional leadership was prioritizing the investigation of Wikileaks, an anonymous Senator killed the Senate’s proposed whistleblower protection law, and we debunked the myth that Wikileaks was putting lives in danger in Zimbabwe. As for those domain seizures that Homeland Security would later quietly reverse course on, at this point they were still clamming up about their obvious errors while we wrote about how much those legal and technical errors mattered and how it appeared they invented a non-existent rule about criminal contributory infringement. Also, this was the week a new report argued that Andrew Wakefield’s infamous study linking vaccines to autism was not just a mistake, but an outright fraud.