This Week In Techdirt History: April 28th – May 4th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, Texas began pushing its bill that would allow the state to sue Twitter for banning conservatives, while Facebook filed a questionable lawsuit over fake followers and likes, and a New York saxophonist became the latest to join the bandwagon of suing Fortnite developers. The Supreme Court asked the White House to weigh in on the copyrightability of APIs, while the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling that got Section 230 right. And while Congress was pushing a terrible bill to massively expand patent trolling, we looked at another frontier for bad IP verdicts: the world of trade secrets.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, Keith Alexander faced his toughest interview yet… at the hands of comedian John Oliver. Voltage Pictures was abusing trademark law to go after downloaders, while we looked at the vicious cycle of trademark abuse, and lawsuits accusing copyright trolls of extortion were proving successful. Senators Feinstein and Chambliss were taking another crack at a cybersecurity bill, while also letting James Clapper talk them out of requiring transparency around drone strikes. We also heard one of the dumbest ideas about the future of the movie business: that pricing would be based on the size of a viewer’s screen.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, we wrote about the misplaced sense of entitlement that was so dominant in the recording and newspaper industries in the internet age, while music and book publishers in Germany were demanding ISPs block file sharing sites, Google was denying similarities to The Pirate Bay, and the USTR was fearmongering about Canadian piracy. The conditions placed on a former RIAA lawyer who joined the DOJ provided yet another look at how fast the revolving door spins, and Warner Music picked a bad fight by issuing a DMCA takedown on a Larry Lessig presentation. And as a reminder that things don’t necessarily change that much, we looked at a newspaper article panicking about sheet music piracy in 1897.