This Week In Techdirt History: April 19th - 25th

Furnished content.


Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, Sony was once again warning the media not to report on leaked emails — and they even sent a letter to Techdirt, to which we publicly responded — while MPAA boss Chris Dodd was implying that the US should go after Wikileaks for publishing them. Perhaps because the emails revealed things like how the MPAA pirated clips from Google commercials to make its own propaganda videos, and strategized about how to "tell the positive side" of internet censorship. Meanwhile, major record labels were trying to get SOPA by the back door, via a lawsuit against MP3Skull, and the war on owning-what-you-buy was being waged on fronts from GM vehicles to DVDs.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, since everyone had already seen ACTA after the full text leaked, the USTR decided it was time to release it. The revised text was only slightly less awful than expected, and of course was missing one piece of information that would have been especially interesting: what each country was pushing for.Also this week in 2010: Google began releasing stats on info and takedown requests from governments, a look at piracy stats showed the UK ones to be just as bogus as US ones and revealed that the MPAA unsurprisingly refused to share details on how it collected its numbers, and the Canadian entertainment industry was launching a new media campaign to push for draconian copyright laws.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, Verizon's CEO was deftly responding to consumer demands by complaining about the very fact that customers want any kind of service at all, while the ISP war on VoIP was bringing more companies in more countries into the fray, as was the recording industry's war on lyrics websites. We took a closer look at the entertainment industry's relationship with federal law enforcement, Microsoft's weak-sauce attempts to keep Encarta competitive with Wikipedia, and the latest impossible promise of perfect DRM (coming just as other providers of copy protection software got locked in a patent battle). This was also the week that Adobe bought Macromedia.

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