from the not-so-distant-past dept
Five Years Ago
This week in 2014, while Roca Labs was going off the rails in a case that kept getting more and more bizarre, we saw a mixed bag of court decisions: Warner Bros. was ordered to reveal its automated DMCA takedown notice process, a judge adjusted the MP3Tunes ruling while blasting both sides for their approach, and the music labels unsurprisingly won their suit against Grooveshark — with the silver lining that the ruling didn’t screw up DMCA safe harbors like it could have.
Meanwhile, Eric Holder was employing some disgusting FUD in his fight against phone encryption (and wasn’t alone), as it became clear just how little he cared about digital rights.
Ten Years Ago
Last week, the Lily Allen saga flared up, got weird, then mostly concluded. But there was still one development remaining, and the only truly positive thing to come out of the whole affair — this week in 2009, Dan Bull namedropped Mike in his excellent song Dear Lily in what would become a brief trend of such “open letters” from the UK musician and spark an ongoing friendship with Techdirt:
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2004, because nothing in this realm ever changes but the digit, folks were talking about the need to chill out on the 5G 4G 3G hype, and quite possibly the mobile TV hype too. A growing number of doctors were calling for an end to mobile phone bans in hospitals, while the New York Times, in typical fashion, was finally realizing that schools had gotten rid of such bans and dutifully bringing us this amazing breaking news. And a lot of newspapers were starting to get nervous about Google News, leading some to rightly suspect that they’d sue if Google monetized it. Meanwhile, we saw a surprisingly good call from the Patent Office when it rejected Microsoft’s patent on the FAT file system (though unsurprisingly they would manage to get it approved two years later, eventually enabling their infamous lawsuit against TomTom).