Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week

Techdirt

from the new-feature-time dept

Okay, we’re launching a new feature this week, to see how it goes. We’ve had these voting buttons on comments for a while, which will show when certain comments are voted to be particularly insightful or funny, but thought we might as well do some more to promote those. So we’re experimenting with highlighting the most insightful and funniest comments from the past week.

On the most insightful comment, the highest voted comment came from Mike C. in response to the article about the fines the Canadian recording industry had to pay for infringing on the copyrights of artists, his comment, titled Let me see if I get this right read:

1) The major labels end up paying $45 million for over 300,000 cases on infringement. That works out to $150 per incident and yet they want $150,000 per incident here in the USA.

2) The labels get to CONTINUE to perform the acts of infringement as long as they “promise” to pay the artists infringed against in a “timely” fashion.

Yeah… and they wonder why we call them two-faced…

In second place, we had a tie, with one comment from Spaceboy, responding to a question as to why it was unconstitutional that the DMCA blocks you from modding your own devices by explaining why people should be able to do what they want with a product they bought:

It’s unconstitutional because it breaks fair use. I can’t rip a DVD without breaking DMCA, yet I have the right to make legal backups of all my media.

In the case of the PS3, it’s a product, and as consumers we should be able to do whatever the hell we want with it. I can mod my car to make it go way faster than the speed limit, but I am not breaking any laws until I actually go over the speed limit. The Jailbreaking software adds functionality back to the PS3 that Sony stripped away, and no one should be put in jail for modding their hardware.

Voted equally insightful was this comment from Hephaestus concerning Twitter’s response to the government’s request for info on various Wikileaks volunteers. Hephaestus decided to make a larger prediction, noting that “this seems to be the year that the US Government will try to quash the 1st amendment and privacy on the internet”:

I wonder if this will work out better for the US government than it did for the record labels. I some how doubt it. With RIAA and the labels you had an annoyance. With the US government you have a world superpower that is a threat to the first amendment and free speech on the internet. Confiscating domain names, shutting down peoples access to financial services, violating the first, fourth, and fourteenth amenedments of the constitution, calls for the assasination of the head of a foreign news organization. All in all power blatantly abused at the highest levels of government.

With RIAA and the labels actions we have seen a slow gradual change in technology. With the US government getting involved in online affairs I expect to see a huge, and very fast increase in encryption usage and distributed systems. The words “Wake Up Call” come to mind.

I wonder who will win this battle over free speech, freedom to express our thoughts, and privacy on the internet? The billions of us or couple tens of thousand of them.

For the funniest comment, the runaway winner (by far), was on our post about California’s new higher copyright infringement fines, and the comment came from a non-registered user with the accurate username of Mr. Smarta** who broke out the sarcasm with his post:

Those numbers are incorrect. After careful counting and using systems of evaluation that are perfect and without contest, the actual number of jobs lost due to piracy is about 32.5 billion jobs last year. Got that??? Over five times the planet’s entire population was laid off!! You can’t contest that. Every single person was hired and fired over six times. My boss called me in and said “Sorry. We have to let you go. Piracy is rampant and cost you your job.” To which I replied “We sell engine blocks!!!” So there you have it. Someone trading a CD online cost some poor fast food employee his job because that one CD screwed up the burger he was making.

And $58,000,000,000??? What a load of crap. I’ll have you know that the actual loss last year alone was over three hundred times the gross domestic product. Got that?? Three hundred times of our stuff just suddenly was taken out and shipped overseas. Know what we have left now? Rocks!!! That’s it! Rocks, and maybe some sand somewhere. Piracy cost us everything the United States owned. I hope you’re happy now. Download one copy of the movie ‘Inception’, and suddenly some other country repo’s the entire continent. What a bummer…

Nicely done. Coming in second was a comment on our story concerning the World Erotic Art Museum suing Thomas Hawk for posting some photographs he took at the museum on Flickr. In its defense, the Museum noted that there was an “unspoken and unwritten understanding” that visitors wouldn’t post such photos online, to which a commenter named Burton questioned:

If the understanding is both unspoken and unwritten, how is it conveyed, mime?

And, in the honorable mention category, we have a comment from Crade, which scored the combined highest on both the insightful and funny scales, in discussing the TSA’s warning that wearing scanner resistant clothing means they’ll have to grope you:

“My favorite might be the undergarments with the 4th Amendment printed in metallic ink”

They should make some that say
“If you can read this, you are violating my rights”
or maybe
“Am I safe yet?”

And there you go… Everyone’s favorite comments of the week…

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