A Week's Wrap-Up for May 2-8: HISTORY + HINDSIGHT > What Went Down and Insightful Comments

Drumbeats taken from Techdirt:

1 from the what-went-down dept

Sat, May 8th 2021 12:45pm — Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: May 2nd - 8th

> Five Years Ago

- This week in 2016, we were pleasantly surprised when an Australian government commission spoke out about the harms of bad copyright law and bad patent law, while the University of North Dakota was teaching a student all about trademark abuse.

- The DOJ was issuing new rules on espionage investigations in the apparent hopes of avoiding embarrassment, while at the same time deploying some very questionable legal arguments in defense of the FBI's hacking warrants, and the National Intelligence Office's top lawyer was stepping up to defend bulk surveillance and the third-party doctrine.

- We also took a look at how the proper channels for whistleblowers were still a joke, as was the proper channel for requesting government records.

Ten Years Ago

- This week in 2011, Righthaven's woes continued as unsealed documents in one case had other judges questioning the legitimacy of their lawsuits, while the infamous John Steele also got slammed by a judge for a fishing expedition, and Perfect 10 sued the Usenet provider Giganews.

- Meanwhile, the White House published its obnoxious annual Special 301 naughty list of countries with IP laws the US doesn't like, and we took a look at just how dangerous the USTR's approach to naming-and-shaming could be.

-- But the biggest news of the week didn't have much of a Techdirt angle — until we saw the story of the man who unknowingly live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

Fifteen Years Ago

- This week in 2006, there was growing buzz about whether software-as-a-service would kill piracy, while evidence continued to show that the war on movie piracy wasn't working.

- Epson was engaged in the fight against off-brand ink cartridges and the Supreme Court took a sudden interest in patent cases.

- The content industries were playing their game of sneaking bad rules into treaties, while we looked at the constitutionality of the RIAA's per-song fines.

- And it's always interesting to see a quiet, simple mention of Section 230 back before it was known to everyone, in this case in a post about all the lawsuits targeting Google.

Filed Under: history, look back

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2 from the words-with-friends dept

Sun, May 9th 2021 12:00pm — Leigh Beadon

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment responding to Trump's description of his new microblog platform as "a beacon of freedom" and "a place to speak freely and safely":

Translation: "You are free to praise and agree with Trump or you are free to shut up and go away."

In second place, it's That Anonymous Coward with some thoughts on Hollywood lobbyists fighting against IP waivers for COVID vaccines:

Does anyone still have any doubt that they value copyright more than human life?

Not a SINGLE movie can prevent or treat covid, but JUST IN CASE we should make sure people die for not being able to pony up for access to the IP.

Tell me again how the system isn't broken and I will so bitch slap you into next week.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous response to the ol' "intellectual property promotes innovation" claim:

Wow dude. Way to be completely wrong. Modern American innovation is stunted by modern American "intellectual property" laws. Innovation is discouraged by "IP" laws that penalize/ban innovation that anyone can argue is somehow related to their own works.

It is kind of like someone took a look at the history of western science and said "These people are learning from each other, and frequently come up with ideas based on the ideas that came before. Let us have less of this."

Next, it's another anonymous comment in response to the latest example of cops behaving badly:

Cops are... really not great at putting up arguments for why they shouldn't be defunded.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is n00bdragon with another response to Hollywood opposing IP waivers:

Those researchers would never have created a COVID vaccine if they didn't expect a movie to be made about it.

In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the description of people who "had already decided their conclusion and was looking for strawmen to throw up and tear down in order to 'bolster' their point":

Kinda reminds me of someone around here. Oh, I wish I could think of their name. But damn it all, I can’t come up with that name right now. You got any ideas?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from bobvious responding to the argument from Senator Tillis that we can't go sharing "government-supported research":

Come now Mike. Don't you realise that means that Senator Tillis is paying for this out of his OWN pocket??

Finally, we've got K'Tetch who did the legwork to make an ironic joke about our post on bogus DMCA scams based on plagiarized websites:

Oh for shame!

How dare you!
Don't you know I wrote this article first! back on April 31st 1957? How dare you try and claim it as yours!