Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the you-said-it dept

This week we’ve got a rare double winner, with both of our top comments on the insightful side coming from the same person on the same post — about the IFPI taking down Twitch streams for having music in the background. One commenter asked what streamers are supposed to do, leading another to supply a three-point list of options for licensed music, which PaulT extended to win first place for insightful:

4. Get your account blocked anyway because the IFPI’s bots incorrectly identified what you’re playing, and/or don’t understand that you already paid for the licence.

But, prior to that, Paul also had a longer response which took second place:

The easier way is for them to just not play music. This is the equivalent of having a radio on in the background while you’re talking to somebody, they’re not going to jump through legal hoops for the people threatening to ruin their livelihood for that.

“It shouldn’t be all that expensive for streamers to get a license.”

I suggest you have a look around. From my understanding, you need to pay at least 2 agencies with lists of exactly what you played, and then the automated bots don’t check for compliance anyway (if you’re even playing music the requires a licence in the first place). One podcast I listen to regularly is always complaining that their musical intervals are being muted on YouTube even though they’re fully paid up with licensing.

It’s a mess, and since these things always err on the side of caution (they’re rather block someone for playing music that’s allowed vs not blocking someone who’s infringing), you can comply fully and still get screwed. Better not to even try.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a reaction from That Anonymous Coward to the latest instance of egregious police misbehavior. It’s been said before, but it needs to keep on being said:

Few bad apples…

They tell us the cops job is hard & dangerous…
Yet more citizens end up dead than cops during encounters between the two.
We give them cameras to remove any doubt they acted responsibly… magically they break down, fail, erase things, accidentally record cops creating video evidence, record cops bad behavior… but its the techs fault not that some departments had cameras that were broken, fixed, and less than 1 day later dead again.

Perhaps it is time to stop giving cops an inch, cause they’ve just about finished the run to Marathon from all of the passes they’ve been given.

Cops say if citizens don’t follow the little laws (which they always use as a pretext to get the drug dog so they can steal your car) bigger crimes follow. Perhaps no one considered when you let the little rules slide for cops they are more likely to behave like a gang, terrorizing people at will.

Next, we’ve got a comment from Toom1275 about the problems with Swedish copyright law, because if we’re going to call infringement “theft” then turnabout is fair play:

When Copyright becomes used more often to commit theft than to defend from it, perhaps there’s a bit of a problem.

As for the funny side, I normally leave out staff comments from these lists, but this week the top winner was Mike responding to a funny anonymous comment — responding to the appeals court ruling allowing copyright on collections of facts — that itself made it to third place on the leaderboard. So we’re going to go out of order, and highlight that comment first as an editor’s choice:

Here is a compilation of all my favorite articles from Techdirt:

::Lists every article they have ever published::

I now own Techdirt. Sorry, Mike.

Mike rocketed to first place for funny with his one-word reply:

Shit.

In second place, we’ve got a response from Mason Wheeler to our observation that the game we helped design to start nuanced conversations instead of Twitter hysteria just led to Twitter hysteria:

You expected the Twits to not act like twits?

And, for our final editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got discordian_eris responding to China’s censorship of John Oliver for the crime of comparing the president to Winnie the Pooh:

HBOs comment on this was simply “Oh bother”.

That’s all for this week, folks!