Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the chitter-chatter dept

This week, our top comment on the insightful side came in response to the disturbing Supreme Court ruling on police shootings. Uriel-238 had a sad and simple thought:

Once again, history rhymes.

[We indict the King of Great Britain] For protecting [English soldiers], by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States

— Thomas Jefferson, among the indictments in the Declaration of Independence.

In second place, it’s Ehud Gavron who appears to have some first-hand knowledge of the DOJ’s Backpage seizure:

Today’s “Raid” in Tucson’s premiere colocation facility

Five FBI and one IRS (Treasury) agents showed up, armed with a search&seizure warrant and some sidearms. We were impressed they can wear 5.11 tactical pants in the hot Arizona heat.

They were professional, courteous, and allowed us to contact the point-of-contact for Backpage’s hosting provider. (We merely provide the colocation datacenter space, not the servers or content).

They took all the servers offline, extracted from racks, photographed them, and took them away.

I offered to get them stock shots of other servers, since servers from the outside don’t really tell you *anything* about content on the inside or who posted it.

Also in the warrant they intend to seize the “criminal intent of the mind” but it wasn’t clear of whose. I asked about how they intended to do that… and got a smile.

And now there are reports they also raided the backpage founders’ homes … I have to wonder why today…

Ehud

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous commenter who was understandably confused about the ridiculous patent being wielded by a troll against Spotify:

I didn’t realize Spotify was selling a music playing computer.

The very first of the claims are definitely not how music services function. Soundcloud, et. al. have no real need of a sound card. The patent covers a PC-ish device to be a music player.

The current providers have zero need of a sound card. 1998 this might have seemed like innovation to the unaware but post Alice it’s a freakin joke.

Next, we’ve got a response from drewdad to our post about copyright lawyers freaking out that photos taken by AIs could be in the public domain:

It is a problem… for lawyers

The problem is that copyright lawyers need copyrights to litigate.

Of course they want everything under a copyright.

Over on the funny side, our first place comment is from Stephen T. Stone about the Iowa town that tried to shut down a resident’s critical website complaining about the stench from a meat processing plant:

“Now Sibley’s known for something other than blood plant stench. It’s known for employing officious, censorial busybodies who seem to believe the only permissible speech is speech they like.”

There’s a difference?

In second place, we’ve got an anonymous commenter responding to our description of PACER’s morass of fees:

Do a search? That’ll cost you 10 cents. View a docket in a long case? With no warning, that could add $3 to your bill

Not even Comcast is as good at hiding fees as PACER is.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about a lawyer’s bogus copyright claim over the use of his headshot, and the question of who actually took the photo — which these days is not always so simple:

It was a monkey, so it should be immediately clear to everyone that no copyright…oh. Wait.

And finally, we’ve got a non sequiter (as far as I can tell) comment from That Anonymous Coward spurred by a typo in our headline (“scorebard”), and which surely either came from or is destined to become a Dungeons & Dragons meme:

Strength is being able to crush a tomato.

Dexterity is being able to dodge a tomato.

Constitution is being able to eat a bad tomato.

Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad.

Charisma is being able to sell a tomato-based fruit salad.

A tomato based fruit salad is salsa!

Hey guys, I found the bard.

That’s all for this week, folks!