Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the a-passenger-train-filled-with-chemicals dept

This week was a good one for comment voting, with much more voting than usual. It’s great to see so much participation. Leading the way (by a lot) on the “insightful” voting was nospacesorspecialcharacters with his comment responding to the story about how you don’t really own what you thought you bought at Amazon.com when it comes to digital content. He thought that there need to be some new rules:

All online retailer should be specified by law to change the wording of their offerings.

If T&Cs call the media item a “license” then the button should say “License” rather than “Buy”, and it should be clear to the purchaser they are buying a “license” from the the “owner” and nothing more.

That would not only solve much of the confusion and heartache, it might draw more mainstream focus on the whole issue of over-reaching copyright maximalism.

Coming in second was Tim K pointing to a bit of irony in Universal Music insisting that there’s no real way for them to tell if a video they issue a takedown over is fair use or not. Considering what they seem to demand of Google, there’s a big double standard:

So they don’t know when things aren’t infringing, they can’t just throw videos through a filter to see if they are actually legal content, but Google should be able to do that, right?

Narrowing down to just two for editor’s choice was really difficult this week, but let’s start with James Burkhardt responding to someone insisting that the only way that Techdirt has suggested artists make money is through concerts — and that it’s wrong to say that we’ve suggested “many, many” ways to make money. Burkhardt did a nice job setting that person straight:

Lets see if I can think of some ways TechDirt has brought up that people make money outside of gatekeepers or other traditional means (and to keep it simple for you, I will at first limit it to examples In this article):
In order:
A) Offer a low-cost DRM-Free download with no hurdles (earned more then a million dollars in 12 days, rather then getting only one sale and being pirated)
B)Offer a pay-what-you-want product, with bonus content if you pay more.
C)Connect with fans and get them invested in your project/product (which is how Apple got big, BTW)
D)Use the power of the internet to find a niche and connect with fans without a record label
E)Connecting with fans, Touring
F)Connecting with fans, and get them invested in your project/product
G)Offer a pay-what-you-want product to encourage word-of-mouth sales growth
H)Connect with fans, get them invested in your project/product, have them directly finance your project
I)Connect with fans, get them invested..

Your right, there only seems to be one way to make money outside of a gatekeeper. Connecting with fans. You know what the funny thing is? In music, that is how you make money when you have a major label backing you. It often is the way in other industries as well. Why do movie/TV studios want Joss Wheadon or Tim Burton? They have fans, and its that connection that helps drive sales. You just have to be proactive about it when you are independent. You have to cultivate them, rather then flinging shit until the fans start appearing like mold. Joss Wheadon and Tim Burton have definite styles, which appeal to specific consumers and those consumers have networked a whole fan base.

Johnathan Coulton is the same way, but he cultivated his fan base like growing a Bonzai tree (ok, he likely didn’t fight that hard). Once you have that fan base, there are many approaches to making money. And Gatekeepers are only one option.

For the second editor’s choice, we’ll go with PaulT’s comment, responding to my post about how easy it is for people to miss disruptive trends:

I’d say part of the reason it’s missed is that the fact that the initial capabilities of a device only hint at what will ultimately be possible. Take for example the telephone mentioned above. Yes, in terms of its initial capabilities, it probably wasn’t that impressive. Most of the people you’d want to talk to would likely be close enough to visit, it would have been too expensive to say as much in a long distance call as you could in a letter and so forth. But, in the long term as things improved, it not only improved its own capabilities to a huge degree, it also made other things possible that nobody could have dreamed – from the internet to modern mobile communication.

That’s where the real innovation comes in. Yes, the TV was unimpressive compared to a cinema screen, but it enabled not only its own evolution but the videogame industry as well. Gramophones were once a poor substitute for sitting around the piano with a group of friends, but now look what’s happened. I bet the first cars seemed rather silly compared to a good old horse carriage in its early days, but would even recognise this world if it had never existed? I doubt it.

I think that’s part of the reason why these innovations are so disruptive to begin with. They really do look like toys or fads to the unimaginitive, and by the time their true potential can be seen, it’s often too late to catch up.

Excellent points. But were they funny? Hell, no. So let’s move on to the funny comments. Leading the way is the excellently named Jeff_Vader_runs_the_Deathstar? who responded to my rhetorical question to people who think that me arguing for better business models means I’m against artists making money: “Is telling someone that jumping of a bridge is not a good way to fly mean that we’re against people flying?” Jeff’s response elicited one of those it’s funny ’cause it’s true feelings:

No but it likely could be construed as felony interference with the business model of doctors fixing broken bones of amateur super heros.

Coming in second was Bergman’s response to a judge in the UK telling Apple it really needed to tell the world that Samsung didn’t copy its products, in which the judge noted that “the acknowledgment must come from the horse’s mouth.” Bergman took issue with part of that:

Obviously the judge is at least partially in error.

I wouldn’t describe Apple as the horse’s mouth. I’d describe them as the other end.

As for editor’s choice, we have an Anonymous Coward pointing out that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s fear mongering over potential cyber attacks is so stupid, he can’t even keep his trains straight:

I like the “derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals” part myself. Those are called freight trains and they typically don’t carry passengers.

Perhaps Panetta should learn how trains work before going off the deepend with cybersecurity FUD.

And, finally, my last editor’s choice comment of the week, which actually made me laugh the most, is a comment from one of our usual critics, apparently insisting that you can’t complain about the massive expansion of IP laws over time, without also complaining about the “expansion of the First Amendment.”

I’m just pointing out how silly it is that Mike rants about the expansion of IP, but he never complains about the similar expansion of the First Amendment.

Yeah, really not much to say about that other than to shake your head and laugh. Such people do exist in this world, amazingly.