This Week In Techdirt History: July 21st – 27th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2019, we looked at how the FTC’s settlement with YouTube pissed everyone off and how its settlement with Facebook got everything backwards. Oakland was on its way to becoming the third city to ban facial recognition tech while Orlando police ended their facial recognition deal with Amazon and a UK parliamentary committee called for an end to use of the tech by the government. A judge tossed a crazy copyright lawsuit over a Gigi Hadid photo, while another tossed a lawsuit that claimed muting a Runescape character violated the first amendment. Meanwhile, Tulsi Gabbard launched her lawsuit against Google.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2014, a FOIA request revealed just how much data airlines and travel sites shared with the feds (who then stored it unencrypted), while an ex-State Department revealed that everyone was focused on the wrong NSA surveillance programs. A judge gave the government open-ended access to all content in a suspect’s Gmail account, while we saw the fallout from another court’s overly broad discovery order. A report revealed just how many supposed terrorist plots were actually cooked up by the FBI, and it appeared the DC police were taking lessons from them. Also, we got a couple stark examples of the revolving door, with both the main architect of PIPA and Hollywood’s former favorite congressman taking jobs lobbying for the MPAA.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2009, we were trying to tell the newspaper industry that Google is not making money from news (though the message still doesn’t seem to have landed), and were pushing back on the idea that the internet would be empty without the copyright-driven content industries. We dug deeper into the AP/Shepard Fairey case, looked at copyright lobbyists celebrating bogus stats with government officials, and wrote about how we might have been smarter about copyright laws 100 years earlier. Meanwhile, Disney managed the feat of getting its own movie trailer taken down from YouTube, while more musicians were getting annoyed about record labels getting their music videos taken down.