This Week In Techdirt History: October 27th – November 2nd
Five Years Ago
This week in 2019, Comcast was putting on an innocent act regarding consumer privacy, while we looked at one Idaho town that was doing broadband competition right. India was looking to get into the mass facial recognition game, while NBC was facing legal threats for reporting on a company’s facial recognition tech being used against Palestinians. We wrote about the content moderation challenges around vaccines (which would soon, of course, become a much bigger topic), and our FOIA lawsuit against ICE yielded an admission about their domain seizures. We also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the internet.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2014, a ruling in the EU Court of Justice said that embedding is not infringing, while Spain passed a new copyright law demanding payments for snippets and links, and The New Yorker published a long feature on the ridiculous state of copyright law. Stefan Molyneux was sued for abusing the DMCA, while the EFF published rankings of service providers based on how well they stood up to copyright and trademark bullies. Comcast and Verizon agreed to pay millions to settle claims of overbilling, and the MPAA and movie theaters were freaking out about Google Glass. And we also learned more about how the UK’s GCHQ could get warrantless access to bulk NSA data.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2009, Google was embroiled in various legal fights: explaining in court why it shut down someone’s Gmail over a missent email, dealing with a criminal copyright investigation in Germany over YouTube, and getting sued over patents on open source code. Warner Bros. shut down a Harry Potter themed dinner for infringement, while NPR was the latest to join the bogus DMCA takedown brigade, just in time for the EFF to launch its takedown hall of shame. Also, this was the week that Geocities went offline.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”