This Week In Techdirt History: September 29th – October 5th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, a big new study showed once and for all that net neutrality did not hurt broadband investment, while telcos were teaming up with Rupert Murdoch to lob antitrust accusations at Google, because apparently Comcast felt qualified to give lectures on monopoly power. A court said the FCC can’t stop states from protecting net neutrality, and nobody was particularly surprised when Buzzfeed linked bogus public comments on net neutrality directly to the broadband industry. Meanwhile, Mark Warner was repeating Ted Cruz’s made up claims about Section 230, while the NY Times opinion section was getting the law all wrong again. Also, we officially released Working Futures, our anthology of short speculative fiction about the future of work.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, a judge adjusted the MP3Tunes ruling, while major labels easily won their lawsuit against Grooveshark (with the only silver lining being that the ruling didn’t ruin DMCA safe harbors), and we dug deeper into the problems with the Sirius XM ruling. The MPAA was trying to ignore the inconvenient results of a study it paid for, Warner Bros. was ordered to reveal the process by which it sends automated DMCA takedowns, and a new copyright exception in the UK put a lot of faith in the taste of judges. Also, what would become a high-profile fight kicked off when the San Diego Comic-Con sent a trademark cease and desist to the Salt Lake City Comic-Con.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, another very famous trademark fight (though we had no idea it would become one at the time) got started when North Face went after a student for his line of South Butt parody clothing. Congress was moving forward with a law requiring warnings on P2P apps, senators were looking to remove telcos’ retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretaps, and the USTR was defending its lack of transparency around ACTA. BPI was continuing to make things up about ISPs and file sharing, while we looked at whether ignoring a RIAA lawsuit was cheaper than fighting. Also, friend of Techdirt Dan Bull dropped a catchy little musical open letter related to some recent Techdirt drama.