This Week In Techdirt History: April 9th – 15th

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, Congress (apparently having learned nothing from SOPA) was pushing forward with CISPA, the new cybersecurity bill. In its original form it was really, really bad — then a new draft was released that was slightly better but still full of problems. Nevertheless, the House Intelligence Committee launched a new Twitter account to misleadingly plug the bill, and it was even supported by companies like Facebook along with a promise not to abuse it — though we challenged them to go a step further and withdraw support until it was fixed to prevent anyone from abusing it.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the lacklustre response to the Windows Vista launch was sending ripple effects through the computer hardware industry, though it appeared to be a bad time for consumer electronics in general. Though while some were chattering about Microsoft’s demise, cooler heads pointed out that might be going a bit too far.

Also this week in 2007: Perfect 10 reared its head with a shotgun spray of lawsuits, a court pointed out the should-have-been-obvious fact that the First Amendment applies on MySpace as much as it does anywhere else, and Techdirt was nominated for a Webby award.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, plenty of folks were busy hacking the iPod to do new things and helping chart the future of mobile devices — right at the same time that thumb keyboards were becoming all the rage in the wake of the popularity of the Blackberry. Google was still in its pre-IPO days and trying to pin down a business model, and this was long before it came into conflict with the Authors Guild which, at the time, was moaning about Amazon for showing used book prices next to new book listings. But we took a look at the other side of that equation and saw how empowering a used book selling platform can be.

One-Hundred And Twenty-Three Years Ago

We’ve all heard of the early “nickelodeon” movie houses where five cents in a machine let you enjoy a brief kinetoscope of a butler falling over or whatever. It was on April 14, 1894 that this started with the first paid exhibition of motion pictures at Andrew M. Holland’s phonograph store in New York City.