Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the chatterbox dept

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to our post about various stories of cops causing huge problems for restaurants in retaliation for some invented or vastly exaggerated slight. In first place, it’s an anonymous anecdote:

The other night, my family and I were eating at a hamburger place-type family restaurant. Four cops came in to get their dinner. I was shocked to realize that I suddenly felt LESS safe, not more.

Restaurants aren’t the only reputations cops have ruined.

In second place, it’s Ehud Gavron with a maxim, and a worrying claim:

There are two types of cops…
Bad cops…
…and those who allow them to continue being bad cops.

Ehud
P.S. The FBI interviewed me one morning because, among other things, I’d posted this comment on TechDirt previously. Yeah. That happened.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with one more comment from that post. This time it’s Stephen T. Stone responding to accusations that we at Techdirt are anti-police, pro-drug-addict, and a bunch of other nonsense:

I do not dare say I speak for everyone here, but in regards to my personal positions?

anti-police

If acknowledging the faults and wrongdoings of police officers make me or anyone else here ?anti-police?, so be it. I would rather be ?anti-police? than someone who blindly accepts the word of the cops every time.

pro-drug-addict

Yes, I am in favor of measures such as clean needle exchanges and the legalization (and regulation) of all drugs. What of it?

anti-American

Acknowledging the mistakes of the United States is not being ?anti-American??it is acknowledging that this country has a long history of fuck-ups leading back to the days of the original English colonies that became the first 13 states.

for unlimited immigration

I am in favor of a less cruel immigration system.

for whatever technicality will let criminals escape justice

People accused of a criminal act have civil rights, too. If the justice system decides to infringe upon those rights, those who did the infringing have only themselves to blame if the accused?regardless of their actual guilt?walks free.

advocate of corporations using alleged “First Amendment Right” to control the “platforms” meant to be The Public’s outlets

You have confused ?private? for ?privately-owned? again. Just because Facebook is open to the public does not mean it has any legal, moral, or ethical obligation to let anyone use the platform to spread speech with which the Facebook owners/administrators disagree. The same goes for Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and any other privately-owned Internet service that is open to the general public. If you believe in the notion that the government can force the admins of Facebook, Twitter, etc. to allow certain people or certain types of speech on those platforms, you have done nothing to prove that the government has such a right.

Here it takes three examples and condemn millions of persons.

Techdirt and numerous commenters here ?condemn? the police in general because of the numerous examples of LEOs overstepping their authority or outright breaking the law while on the job. To ignore the wrongdoings of police to uphold some sort of ridiculous ?Blue Lives Matter? mindset is to give the police a free pass on any kind of wrongdoing, up to and including murder. If you want to do that, go join a police union.

Techdirt was never the site you believed it was.

No, it was never the site you believed it was. You are not everyone else, and you do not speak for everyone else.

Next, we’ve got an anonymous comment that excellently sums up the real reason the entertainment industry is scared of online creative platforms:

When a corporation can only produce a few hours of video a day, the 500 hours plus a minute being uploaded to YouTube looks like a major threat. Piracy is the means by which they hope to stem that flood, by making the legal risk of missing and infringing upload so high that the sites cannot function without becoming publishers themselves, and damming up that flood.

Piracy itself is not doing them a lot of damage, and maybe is a minor benefit, but those self publishers are stealing away their audience and income.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous joke that just had to happen after Mike shared an email that attempted to blackmail him via knowledge of an old and “unimportant” password:

So you use “important” site passwords for adult video sites? Interesting…

In second place it’s another anonymous commenter with a sarcastic response to the latest evidence that pirates buy lots of media when there are compelling legal options:

But Timothy, making a good service and actually competing and being successful commercial enterprises is hard! Computers and network bandwidth and physics and all the things that make digital content convenient, reliable, and accessible can’t be bribed like politicians can!

Won’t anyone think of the poor middlemen negotiators who would be out of work if these corporations had to actually compete?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from Michael sharing a similar experience:

They threatened to sent it to 9 of my friends. Since I don’t have 9 friends, I was skeptical, but I figured if they sent it to 9 people, at least one of them would become my friend because I am pretty awesome on camera.

And finally we head to the appeals court ruling which offered at least some hope of defeating the ridiculous notion that publishing standards incorporated into law can be stopped with copyright, in the form of a perfectly chosen literary reference:

But, Mr Dent, the laws incorporating those patented standards have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

That’s all for this week, folks!