from the back-to-the-past dept
Five Years Ago
During the hiatus from history posts, we missed an important event last week in 2018, when Backpage was shut down by the DOJ. It should have resulted in people realizing that FOSTA/SESTA was unnecessary (as the indictment made clear), but of course this week in 2018 was all about politicians pretending it somehow proves FOSTA/SESTA is good. And then, after Trump predictably signed the law, the already-successful complaint against the site was amended to include retroactive FOSTA/SESTA provisions.
Meanwhile, we saw a couple old “friends” rear their heads: there were more developments in the Vimeo copyright infringement case that had been going on for nearly a decade, and of course, there was yet another development with the Monkey Selfie.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, a campaign was launched calling on lawmakers to fix the CFAA, while we highlighted how violations of the law were commonplace. Lawmakers, for their part, were focused on secretly marking up CISPA, while not fixing any of its problems. The head of the Authors Guild was blaming everyone for destroying authors, while TV networks were threatening to pull channels off the air of Aereo and Dish won their lawsuits. And we had plenty of drama in some other Main Character lawsuits: Charles Carreon was ordered to pay $46,000 in legal fees, while the Prenda saga went on. And on, and on.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, Universal Music Group made the absurd legal claim that it owns all the promotional CDs it has ever distributed, forever. In Australia, following a police crackdown on DVD piracy, an audit discovered that cops themselves were some of the biggest DVD pirates. In Europe things were looking a bit more positive, with the European Parliament rejecting the IFPI plan that would turn ISPs into copyright cops, and the Paris Bar Council banning a lawyer from practicing law for six months over attempts to engage in the “copyright pre-settlement letter” scheme. And we took a closer look at the arguments for and against software and business model patents.
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