This week in 2017, experts were weighing in on how SESTA would harm trafficking victims, while the California case against Backpage moved forward over money laundering claims. A look at the original comments sent to the FCC showed that 98.5% of them were opposed to killing net neutrality rules, and even many ISP-backed allies thought Ajit Pai was going too far, though that didn’t stop AT&T from blatantly lying and saying most consumers want net neutrality to end. Trump rolled back the ban on the transfer of military equipment to law enforcement agencies, while Jeff Sessions was citing Hurricane Harvey as proof that the cops need to be militarized. And Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against the New York Times was tossed due to a lack of actual malice.

This week in 2012, jurors from the Apple/Samsung trial admitted they finished quickly by ignoring prior art and other key factors, and the foreman offered an explanation of the verdict that showed he didn’t really understand prior art. After 18 months of censoring Rojadirecta, the feds gave up and dropped the case, and Congress had a lot of questions for the DOJ and ICE about their botched domain seizures in general, but while the feds were dropping the bad cases, another site admin was held without bail and facing deportation. We also got another look at the revolving door problem when the US Copyright Office General Counsel left the job to become a lobbyist for the IFPI, and another look at the problems with TPP negotiations when the USTR gave public interest groups just eight minutes to talk about their concerns.

This week in 2007, the successful unlocking of an iPhone caused telecom panic, Sony was getting tangled up in another rootkit mess, and a patent troll sued all kinds of people over automated email responses. Howard Berman wanted to force ISPs to do the RIAA’s bidding, a group opposing the freeing up of publicly funded research got hypocritical about copyright, and we took a detailed look at why fashion copyright is a terrible idea. After being ordered to track users, TorrentSpy decided to cut off US users instead, and it was later revealed that the MPAA had gotten access to TorrentSpy executives’ emails.

As we continue to celebrate our 25th anniversary, this week you can look back on the second ever edition of the newsletter that would eventually become Techdirt, and you can also check out Mike’s retrospective on some of its contents.

Filed Under: history, look back

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