This Week In Techdirt History: January 11th – 17th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2021, we wrote about how critics of Section 230 should rethink their position considering their biggest allies were Senators Hawley and Cruz, while former FCC boss Tom Wheeler was continuing to misunderstand and misrepresent Section 230 and the challenges of content moderation. Amazon’s decision to kick Parler off its web hosting service raised serious questions about content moderation at the infrastructure layer, which we dug into in depth. We also published thoughts from Paul Alan Levy on Twitter’s decision to ban Donald Trump’s account, shortly before Jack Dorsey came out with an explanation of how the decision was made.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2016, we looked at how despite fears of piracy Hollywood had yet another record-breaking year at the box office, which was even true with films that got leaked early like Hateful Eight. Louis Vuitton lost its trademark lawsuit over a joke bag and was gently rebuked by the judge, Forbes served up a bunch of malware ads after begging readers to turn off ad blockers, and the Bernie Sanders campaign sent a DMCA notice to Wikimedia for hosting its logos. Twitter was hit with a ridiculous lawsuit for “providing material support” to ISIS, and President Obama used his State Of The Union address to praise the open internet while complaining that terrorists were able to use it.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2011, we looked at all the mistakes the government made in demanding info about Wikileaks from Twitter, while giving kudos to Twitter for not just rolling over in response to the demands, and wondering what other companies were hit with similar demands. Rep. Peter King asked the Treasury Department to put Wikileaks on the list of terrorist organizations and was quickly rebuked since the site didn’t meet the criteria. Sony got a restraining order against George Hotz for restoring the PS3’s feature allowing the installation of other operating systems, Congress continued its January tradition of promising patent reform that would never materialize, and the AP and Shepard Fairey settled the lawsuit over Fairey’s famous image of Obama.