Chronology of Events - 2000s

The following is a chronological listing of significant events in the development of the field of Information Technology law during the 2000s:

2000
2000 &mdash; The Dot Com bubble bursts, investment capital dries up and the Nasdaq stock index plunges.

January 1, 2000 &mdash; Many experts, governments and businesses feared that the change of century/millennium would cause serious problems with computer systems, since many legacy software programs shortened the year stored to only the last two digits, such as storing 99 for 1999. When the year 2000 came, the year 2000 would be shortened to 00, causing the computer to think it was 1900. Called the Year 2000 (Y2K) bug, extensive investments in software remediation resulted in only a few glitches, and no catastrophic system shutdowns.

January 10, 2000 &mdash; AOL acquires Time Warner.

March 2000 &mdash; At a meeting in Cairo, Egypt, ICANN adopts a process for external review of its decisions that utilizes outside experts, who will be selected at an unspecified later date. ICANN also approves a compromise whereby 5 at-large Board members will be chosen in regional online elections. June 2000 &mdash; ICANN issues its second Status Report, which states that several of the tasks have been completed, but work on other tasks was still under way.

June 13, 2000 &mdash; The RIAA files a motion for preliminary injunction against Napster to block all major-label content from being exchanged on Napster.

July 2000 &mdash; At a meeting in Yokahama, Japan, ICANN’s Board approves a policy for the introduction of new top-level domains.

July 26, 2000 &mdash; U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel rules in favor of the RIAA and orders Napster to stop allowing copyrighted material to be exchanged on its service.

August 2000 &mdash; The Department of Commerce and ICANN approve MOU amendment 2, which deleted tasks related to membership mechanisms, public information, and registry competition and extended the MOU until September 2001. They also agree to extend the cooperative research and development agreement on root server stability and security through September 2001. November 2000 At a meeting in California, ICANN selects 7 new top-level domains: .biz (for use by businesses), .info (for general use), .pro (for use by professionals), .name (for use by individuals), .aero (for use by the air transport industry), .coop (for use by cooperatives), and .museum (for use by museums).

November 2000 &mdash; After months of legal proceedings, the French court rules Yahoo! must block French users from accessing Nazi memorabilia on its auction site.

November 16, 2000 &mdash; ICANN selects new TLDs: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro.

2001
January 2001 &mdash; Given its inability to block French users from accessing hate memorabilia in its auction site, Yahoo! removes those auctions entirely.

January 2001 &mdash; Wikipedia is launched.

February 12, 2001 &mdash; The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decides the Napster case, ruling that distributors of file sharing software can be held liable for copyright infringement.

March 2001 &mdash; The Department of Commerce enters into a second contract with ICANN regarding technical functions of the domain name system.

March 4, 2001 &mdash; Forwarding email in Australia becomes illegal with the passing of the Digital Agenda Act, since it is seen as a technical infringement of personal copyright.

May 2001 &mdash; ICANN and the Department of Commerce approve MOU amendment 3, which conforms the MOU with the Department’s new agreement with VeriSign (formerly Network Solutions.)

June 22, 2001 &mdash; The Council of Europe finalizes an international cybercrime treaty. This is the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet.

July 2001 &mdash; ICANN issues its third Status Report, which states that most of the tasks in the MOU are either complete or well on their way to completion.

July 2001 &mdash; A federal judge rules that Napster must remain offline until it can prevent copyrighted material from being shared by its users.

August 2001 &mdash; ICANN’s At-Large Membership Study Committee issues a preliminary report that recommends creating a new at-large supporting organization. The new organization would be open to anyone with a domain name and would elect 6 members of ICANN’s Board of Directors.

September 2001 &mdash; The Department of Commerce and ICANN agree to extend the MOU through September 2002 and the cooperative research and development agreement through June 2002 (amendment 4).

November 2001 &mdash; Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, ICANN devotes the bulk of its annual meeting to security issues. The At-large Membership Study Committee releases its final report, which retains the Board reorganization first proposed in August 2001.

November 9, 2001 &mdash; Council of Europe adopts an international cybercrime treaty. This is the first treaty addressing criminal offenses committed over the Internet.

2002
February 2002 &mdash; ICANN's president releases a proposal for the reform of ICANN. March 2002 &mdash; At a Board meeting in Ghana, ICANN’s Board refers the president's proposal and questions about at-large representation and outside review to an internal Committee on ICANN Evolution and Reform.

April 2002 &mdash; The Department of Commerce exercises an option in its contract with ICANN regarding the technical functions of the domain name system, extending it through September 2002.

May 1, 2002 &mdash; Hundreds of Internet radio stations observe a "Day of Silence" in protest of proposed song royalty rate increases.

October 2002 &mdash; BitTorrent 1.0 is publicly distributed.

December 3, 2002 &mdash; A new U.S. law creates a kids-safe, "dot-kids" domain (kids.us) to be implemented in 2003.

December 4, 2002 &mdash; The Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002, Pub. L. 107-321, 116 Stat. 2780 (Dec. 4, 2002) (codified at 17 U.S.C. §114) is enacted.

2003
January 25, 2003 &mdash; The SQL Slammer worm, one of the largest and fastest spreading distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS) ever, takes about 10 minutes to spread worldwide and take down 5 of the 13 DNS root servers along with tens of thousands of other servers.

April 28, 2003 &mdash; Apple's iTunes Store is launched.

July 2003 &mdash; The French Ministry of Culture bans the use of the word "e-mail" by government ministries, and adopts the use of the more French-sounding "courriel".

July 2003 &mdash; Myspace is founded.

July 1, 2003 &mdash; The European Union requires all Internet companies to collect value added tax (VAT) on digital downloads.

August 11, 2003 &mdash; The Blaster worm was launched to exploit a vulnerability in a number of Microsoft Windows operating systems.

September 8, 2003 &mdash; The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sues 261 individuals on for alleged copyright infringement by distributing copyrighted music files over peer-to-peer networks.

2004
January 1, 2004 &mdash;  The CAN-SPAM Act goes into effect.

February 4, 2004 &mdash; Facebook is founded.

December 2004 &mdash; Digg launches.

2005
2005 The One Laptop Per Child project begins. Its goal is to provide low cost, education-designed laptops to children around the world at a very low cost (US$100 per unit).

February 15, 2005 &mdash; YouTube is launched.

July 19, 2005 &mdash; MySpace is purchased by NewsCorp and made part of the Fox Interactive Media division.

October 2005 &mdash; Sony BMG surreptitiously installs malware (known as a rootkit) on its customers' personal computers when they  play certain music CDs on their computers.

2006
August 11, 2006 &mdash; The final software patent on the GIF format expires.

October 6, 2006 &mdash; The Trademark Dilution Revision Act of 2006, Pub. L. 109-312, 120 Stat. 1730 (Oct. 6, 2006) is enacted.