Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

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from the funsightful dept

It’s been a little while, but it appears that Dark Helmet has made his way back to the winner’s circle for this week’s highest voted “insightful” comment. It was on the post for one of Nina Paley’s Mimi & Eunice comic strips concerning having to ask permission to express yourself. When one of our usual critical commenters announced that the US might have “excessive free speech,” a lot of people responded, but the response that people liked best (by a lot) was this potent dose of logic and reality (bolded are the parts that DH is responding to):

“The US already borders on having excessive free speech (see the “church” people protesting at funerals), rather than a lack of it. Even in Canada where you are at Marcus, there is a near unlimited amount of free speech.”

LOLwut? Excessive Free Speech? I love the concept of the serfs having too much freedom in the eyes of the Lords….

“What is the issue? Nina is still hurting from the pouding she got from the copyright industry making Sita, and can’t let go of that feeling, failing to admit to herself that perhaps she made some errors along the way.”

Congrats. You win the Side Swipe Award of the day, in which you take argument A, fail, and then switch to argument B, which has been debunked already, in a sad attempt to make some semblance of a point, and fail again. Your award comes with twenty motivational tapes by Deepak Chopra to help get yo mind, right, as well as two complimentary novelty Chopra eyebrows, valued at thirty-seven dollars a piece.

“Free speech doesn’t mean that everything is absolutely free.”

That’s true. And a hot dog isn’t a vibrator….but what’s your point?

“What restrictions do exist are so small, that most people in the world wouldn’t complain.”

I want to highlight this idiotic statement, because it’s important. This thought is borne of the same mind juices that produce “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. It’s an inability to recognize that the United States (and to some degree by extension, our North American neighbors) are built on a very simple concept: striving for the ideal.

Using your logic, the Civil Rights movement of the 60’s never should have happened, because those people had it waaaaaay better than when they were enslaved, so they shouldn’t have been complaining. Based on your logic, Chinese and Irish railroad workers who were getting their heads kicked in while being prejudized against should have kept their mouths shut, because at least they weren’t enduring a worse oppressive regime or a potato famine.

Based on your logic, this country wouldn’t progress, because we’d be so busy basking in our own unfinished business to ever reach a little further for the next rung on the ladder.

Based on your logic, we’d never have had these freedoms to begin with if you had been in charge all those years ago.

Nicely done. That comment also ranked highly on the funny charts… but not high enough. Second place with insightful was a simple comment from an anonymous coward in response to the story about corruption and fraud accusations involving the music collection society in Spain. The comment was directed at all the people who claim that copyright infringement is “theft.” This AC pointed out the obvious:

^^^ THIS is piracy. THIS is theft.

You paying attention trolls?

As for editor’s choice, our first one comes from MrWilson, responding to a blog post from a guy, John DuPuis, who works for an anti-piracy company, in which the entire point of the article was to attack Senator Ron Wyden for daring to take into account the best interests of the people in his state (and elsewhere), rather than just getting in line with the entertainment industry’s demands over ProtectIP. Wilson picked out one of the many stunningly ridiculous claims from DuPuis and chopped it to bits:

“I can?t help but think Senator Wyden should put his country?s survival before the needs of his misinformed and misdirected constituents.”

Hm. So let me get this straight. DuPuis is saying that instead of doing what Senator Wyden was elected to do (represent his constituents), he should instead listen to monied interests and property holders.

More people should be balking at the fact that he just honestly admitted that he’s suggesting the subversion of representation in our government in favor of property owners.

Why do individuals need to vote when their corporations can vote for them?!?

And, for my second and final insightful editor’s choice, we have this wonderful comment from Karl debunking the MPAA’s more ridiculous claims about how ProtectIP is needed to stop people from getting malware in their pursuit of infringement:

Complete FUD

His whole post is filled with fail, and here’s why.

One of the major points in his blog is that the botnet is spread through “affiliates.” Such situations are not new, but are novel for this particular type of malware.

However, Brigner then says that these “affiliates” are “rogue websites.” In other words, he’s strongly implying that the affiliates of botnets and other malware are also websites that are “dedicated to infringing content.”

Except this is absolutely false. The “affiliates” do not, themselves, distribute any content whatsoever. Usually, they try to trick users into believing they’re getting content (or legitimate software, or “antivirus programs”), but the users get the malware instead. In other words, the botnet affiliates have the same relationship to “rogue websites,” as phishing emailers do to Bank of America.

As an illustration: among all the sites ICE seized for copyright infringement, not one was even accused of spreading malware. And why would they? Sites that are “dedicated to infringing content” are almost exclusively community-driven.

This is where his argument falls apart. The PROTECT-IP act considers “rogue websites” to be websites that are “dedicated to infringing content.” If the act passes, not a single malware affiliate will be affected by it.

They will not be any more unlawful than they are now; law enforcement will have no more resources to fight them than they do now. In fact, law enforcement will have fewer resources, because the money that could be used to fight malware affiliates would be diverted into fighting “rogue websites” instead.

Nor will it particularly harm the botnet affiliates if every single “rogue website” shut down. By the time that happened (assuming it even could), the botnet affiliates would have long ago moved on to whatever other types of websites are popular at the moment.

If you want to know what FUD actually means, this blog post is a textbook example

Okay, now that you’re overstuffed on insight, let’s find some room for a dessert of funny. The top rated funny comment this week won by a lot. It was the very first comment on my latest post on RIAA accounting, and was written by Chris Rhodes, about the news that a standard record label contract, thanks to sneaky clauses, could really mean that the label gets 97.5% of the revenue, even if the official royalty rate is 10%. Apparently, I just don’t understand the business:

Without a 97.5% cut for the middlemen, there would be no incentive for anyone to ever create music! Why do you hate music?

It’s a good question. Coming in with a strong second was a fantastic retort from an Anonymous Coward to one of our regular… er… fact- and logic-challenged commenters, explaining what makes his comments so great to read:

I like you, you don’t let little things like the words in an article effect what you think the article is about.

We’ve got three editor’s choice funny comments for the week (because I just couldn’t narrow it down to two). First up is an anonymous commenter who decided to go by the name “Restaurant shill” for the comment, in response to my point about movie theaters, and how people like going out for the experience. In that post, I noted that claiming theaters can’t compete with home theaters is like saying restaurants can’t compete with home cooking. Restaurant shill took this idea and ran with it:

Oh my god…. We have to stop this! the fact that you freetards think you can just make food at home is whats wrong with this country. How are these hardworking restaurant owners supposed to make any money, when every meal you make at home = one lost sale for every restaurant in a 50 mile radius!

These ‘grocery stores'(more like infringment stores amirite?) are just as bad as google is to music about aiding and abetting these clear and present dangers to restaurants.

I think we need to get legislation where restaurat owners can tell the government who they catch making food in their homes and have their electricity/gas stoves cut off(whoever thought those would be a good idea, they are clearly made to defeat restaurant DRM)don’t even get me started on grills…

Then we’ve got Nina Paley’s comment on our (fun!) discussion about whether or not monkeys get the copyright on photos they took:

Without copyright monkeys would have no incentive to photograph themselves.

And, finally, because it really made me laugh, we have Capitalist Lion Tamer’s response to another comment, where the commenter insisted that life for musicians absolutely sucked today because musicians actually have to work for a living, and concluded the post with: “Nice work, asshole pirates.” CLT responded:

I never need to pirate assholes. There’s always plenty in the comment threads.

Ah, well. And they say there’s no civil discourse online any more. Either way, get your own civil discourse ready for next week, and we’ll be back at it tomorrow morning.