Five and Ten years Ago in Techdirt

Five Years Ago

This week in 2020, the RIAA tossed out a bogus DMCA claim to get a YouTube downloading tool pulled from Github and was still flooding Twitch with takedowns that the company was responding to by freaking out and courting a lot of outrage from the users it failed to defend. Meanwhile,YouTuber Lindsay Ellis released an in-depth video about the most entertaining DMCA dust-up of the year. We called out Mark Zuckerberg for betraying the open web and putting his support behind section 230 reform just in time for congress to release yet another bad 230 reform bill and call more tech CEOs in for an internet grievance session. Also, the FCC ignored the courts and finalized its net neutrality repeal.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2015, we walked through the ways you could tell that so-called cybersecurity bill CISA was in fact a surveillance bill which was then made quite clear when the Senate rejected all CISA amendments designed to protect privacy, reiterating that surveillance was the point. We also covered how copyright trolls were now targeting small businesses with absurd demands and how Apple finally fixed an iCloud security hole that allowed hackers to steal private photos.