Weird. Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about how, for the first time ever, the top two comments for both the funniest comment and the most insightful comment were the same on each list. And here we are with it happening again. The winner, by far, for both the funniest comment and the most insightful comment came on the post about the ridiculousness of "permission culture" as illustrated by a musician seeking to get permission to create a parody of a song, and finding it positively Kafkaesque to even begin to tackle the bureaucratic nightmare. One of our regular critics mocked the whole thing by saying that if you want to "borrow someone's property" you need permission, so he didn't see what the big deal was. Of course, that ignored the mess that was actually happening, and so an Anonymous Commenter picked up on someone else's use of "borrowing a ladder" to clarify just how crazy the "permission culture" situation is:

The analogy already works for the ladder.

Say you have some gunk clogging up your roof gutters, and you want to clean it out, but you don't have a ladder.

Of course you ask your neighbour for permission to borrow his ladder for half an hour. However, when you ring the doorbell, an unknown person opens and says that you cannot talk to your neighbour. You cannot borrow the ladder from this unknown person but he can redirect you to someone that might be able to. He gives you a phone number and sends you on your way.

The phone is not answered for days and when you do get someone on the line, he first wants to know what you will be using it for. He can borrow you the ladder if you provide a photo of the ladder in its intended use.

Oh, and of course, while you would then have permission to use the ladder, you are not allowed to go and *take* it. For that, you will need permission from two other people, one to go to the shed where the ladder is, and one to move the ladder from the current location to the location of use. The first is unavailable for comments right now, but his representative knows that he'll most probably happily give you permission if the second one agrees.

The second one first wants a sample of the roof gutter, to prove that you are actually going to use the ladder for the purposes you claim.

So, the steps involved are:
1. take ladder
2. use ladder to get gunk
3. take photo
4. put back ladder
5. show gunk to person in charge of ladder movement
6. receive permission for ladder movement
7. show permission for ladder movement to persion in charge of ladder acquisition
8. receive permission for ladder acquisition
9. show photo from step 3 to person in charge of general ladder-borrowing
10. receive permission to perform step 1.

See? What could anyone possibly be complaining about?

Coming in second place on both lists was a comment from W Klink in response to the MPAA giving Congressional staffers a private screening of the movie Total Recall, along with an "educational program" telling them how bad copyright infringement is. W Klink noted the irony:

They're giving free movies to congressmen to convince them that free movies are bad.

As for editor's choice on the "insightful" side of the coin, we'll kick it off with Nina Paley, responding to the same critic that the winning comment above was responding to. One part of that comment referenced Nina, mocking her for making Sita Sings the Blues first and asking for permission later. Nina noted one key difference between her situation (where she sought permission afterwards) and the musician Huge, who sought it beforehand:

...and Huge asked for permission first. Notice how my movie actually got made.

Yeah. That's the point. The purpose of copyright law is supposed to be to benefit the public by creating incentives for new works. Yet, with Nina copyright would have likely stopped her movie from being made, as it did with Huge.

Next up, we have another Anonymous Coward, doing a good job summarizing the "success" of the recording industry's lawsuits against file sharing sites after it came out that they have no interest in sharing any money they collect with the actual artists:

So, to recap, all of this was an exercise in futility:

1- They (RIAA/IFPI/whatever) got no appreciable amount of money from this.
2- The artists aren't getting any money, full stop.
3- The pirate bay is still up.
4- Piracy is still going strong (or stronger).

Wouldn't it make more sense to invest the money that was wasted in this lawsuit into embracing new technology and new business models that are piracy-proof?

Sound advice that will never be heeded.

Okay, moving on to editor's choice for funny comments. First up, we've got Applesauce, responding to one author's claim that the market for professional writers is dying and the government should just give all writers a living wage. But why stop at book writers?

I learned to program on the Commodore 64 which just turned 40 years old. In the years since then, the market for Commodore 64 programmers has dried up. It took great skill and expertise to write programs using the limited resources of the C64 and that whole way of life has nearly disappeared, to the great impoverishment of that whole C64 industry.

Clearly, as a culture, we cannot allow that loss to continue. I propose a simple structure of federal subsidies to these professionals who have been so unfairly impacted by the predatory encroachments of PC, Apple and Amiga programmers. If not a government subsidy, a fairness tax on other computer manufacturers is only simple justice.

And, finally, from Donnicton, we have a different response to the MPAA's "education" campaign for Congress during which they are doing that screening of the remake of Total Recall. Donnicton was left thinking about who's actually causing Hollywood's problems:

Dear government,

Please grant us more IP protections, so that we may hold onto our exclusive right to continue ironically cheapening our brand with crappy remakes and sequels to classic movies before piracy can cheapen it for us.

Thank you,

MPAA

And on that note, back to the trenches. We'll be back tomorrow with plenty more.