from the a-short-holiday-week dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2018, the latest text of the EU Copyright Directive showed it to be even more disastrous than expected. Thus, its defenders and apologists were busy responding variously with substance-free denial, vague defenses lacking any understanding of the issues, accidental revelations of the true scope of their internet-destroying goals, and deeply misleading information. Thankfully, the EU Parliament ended up voting to step back from the abyss for the time being, while we pushed back against the claims that the directive’s failure was just the result of big tech lobbying and not genuine concerns.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2013, George W. Bush stepped up to defend the NSA’s surveillance programs on the basis that it’s okay because civil liberties are “guaranteed” anyway, while Obama was trying to defend America to angry Europeans (who were thinking about giving Snowden everything from asylum to a medal) on the basis that surely the spying goes the other way, too. A lot of people were trying to pretend the programs were no big deal even though they very clearly were, while FISA judges were unhappy about all the attention they were suddenly getting from an angry public, and the Washington Post was happily abdicating all journalistic responsibility and begging the government to stop them from reporting on leaks.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2008, we got another example of how copyright locks up history, while the RIAA was following the MPAA’s footsteps in asserting that proof shouldn’t be necessary to sue for infringement. Bono agreed with his manager that ISPs are to blame for the downfall of music, while we wondered if the entertainment industry would ever, itself, follow the same kind of three strikes rule it wanted to impose on ISPs. The Viacom/YouTube fight moved forward with YouTube being forced to hand over all kinds of data about people and what videos they watched, while Mark Cuban was putting forth the very wrong argument that Google forfeited safe harbors by filtering for porn.
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