This Week In Techdirt History: January 5th – 11th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the libel tourism of Devin Nunes was continuing to highlight the problems of weak anti-SLAPP laws. A patent troll got smacked down by an appeals court, while there was a twist in Oracle’s attacks on Google, and Apple became the latest company to up the ante in abusing DMCA anti-circumvention provisions. The streaming wars got confusing when a bunch of Disney+ titles disappeared without warning, and got stupid when the AT&T TV service was pulled from Roku. Also, civil FOSTA suits began to show up in court.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we saw one of the dumber claims of music collection groups when a Swedish PRO went after rental car companies for public performance fees on their car radios, while the MPAA was asking regulators to force ISPs to block sites “at the border”, and Rightscorp was unsurprisingly jumping on Canada’s new notice-and-notice system to send bogus shakedown letters. Also, since this was before the more recent resumption of works actually entering the public domain each year, we looked at the works that should have done so in 2015.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2010, CNN published a rather empty take on book piracy, the entertainment industry was trying to sell DRM as a feature, and Sony was declining to support its own movie for an Oscar over misplaced piracy fears. Music publishers forced another lyrics website offline, Game Marketer was getting extra moralistic about piracy, and Viacom was asking for summary judgement against YouTube for secret reasons. We also considered whether France’s new “three strikes” law would matter, and whether the leaking of Wolverine helped it at the box office.