Taking the number one spot in voting (by a decent margin) for "most insightful comment" this week was from That Anonymous Coward in response to filmmaker David Newhoff trying to compare "copyleft" folks who are seeking more reasonable copyright laws and who are fighting against needless and dangerous expansion... to people who are anti-gay marriage. This is exactly as ridiculous and insulting as you'd expect, and TAC didn't hold back in telling Newhoff how he felt:

*walks up to the podium, a small amount of feedback echoes across the loudspeakers*
Mr. Newhoff, on behalf of "My People"... GO FUCK YOURSELF.
I'd say something eloquent, but GO FUCK YOURSELF says so much more.
How DARE you try to equate copyright with the discrimination "My People" face on a daily fucking basis.
How dare you try to frame your pathetic argument that the bad people are stealing from you when my people are regularly discriminated against, beaten, and murdered.
Fuck you, Fuck your shilling, Fuck the lobbyist asswipes you shill for.
As soon as I can get married and not have to keep looking over my shoulder wondering if this might be the next bigoted asshole to beat the shit out of me we can discuss copyright. Until then... GO FUCK YOURSELF.
*drops microphone and walks off stage*

For second place... we actually had a tie. I don't recall ever seeing that before, but you get both of them. First up, is Sneeje responding to the MPAA's insistence that if the court lets legitimate users download their stuff from Megaupload's shuttered servers, that they have to guarantee not a single download infringes. Sneeje suggests this is a pretty big double standard considering the ability to file DMCA notices without proving that a work actually infringes:

Since those that send DMCA notices only have to assert that the notice is factual and correct, why not let those users just simply assert that their downloads do not infringe?

And since that requirement of the DMCA notices appears to be completely toothless, the same should be for these.

And then we have Ima Fish responding to me stating that the Australian government inviting a "consumer representative" to its secret anti-piracy gathering "raised questions," after it came out that the head of that consumer rights group was very active in the fight for stronger copyright enforcement. Fish corrected my claim that it raised questions:

You're kidding right? This doesn't raise any such questions. This answers such questions. Definitively.

Fair point.

Moving on to the "editor's choice" awards for most insightful, let's start with Chris Rhodes responding to someone on the thread about Fiona Apple telling her label to "do nothing." Someone responded that without her label, no one would know who Fiona Apple was in the first place. Rhodes suggested it's not that simple:

Depends. If she were starting her career today, it's quite possible that she'd be just as well known.

Back when physical media was the only way for fans to get your content, the labels were necessary to have your music widely disseminated. Now they aren't necessary.

As an analogy: Just because supplies for the first automobile factories were shipped in by horses doesn't imply that horses continue to be necessary after the automobile was available to everyone, you know?

Good analogy. And our second editor's choice comment comes from Richard, in response to Hollywood, yet again, seeking a backroom deal with some tech companies. Richard pointed out how ridiculous it is to do a backroom deal like that:

Their problem is that if they did have that backroom chat with the tech industry they would wake up a few years later and realise that the companies they talked to no longer mattered.

40 years ago they would have talked to IBM

20 years ago it would have been Microsoft

15 years ago Yahoo

10 years ago Google

6 years ago Myspace

Now Facebook

in 5 years time?

Plus: doing a backroom deal with Hollywood would be a quick suicide method for an innovative Tech company.

Okay. Enough with the insight. I know you guys only come here for the funny stuff. Coming in at the top spot, by a somewhat wide margin was our faux-troll Mr Big Content, who responded to the story about Fox News trying to link the Flame malware to Angry Birds because they both used the same coding language. Mr BC trolled hard, and it's so good that I'll even leave in the homophonic errors:

If their writing legitimate software, why don't they use a legitimate, accepted language, like Microsoft Visual Basic? The mere fact that there choosing to use something obscure like Lua shows that they must have something to hide!

This is why I love Fox News. They ask the tricky questions that nobody else dares to contemplate! You're site could learn something from them, Mike!

Coming in second was BentFranklin responding to the story of beer giant Labatt threatening a newspaper with legal action, because a photo they used of alleged killer Luka Magnotta showed him holding a bottle of Labatt Blue:

I don't always kill people, but when I do I prefer to drink Labatt's Blue.

For editor's choice... you're actually getting four (count 'em) comments this week instead of just two... but it's actually two sets of two comments, that were each different variations on the same story. First up, we've got two responses to the news that Canada was raising its music tariffs for things like playing music at weddings, which included the bizarre feature that if anyone dances at your wedding, it costs twice as much. Jeremy Lyman decided to look on the bright side:

FINALLY

An actual reason not to dance at weddings. Thank you Copyright Board of Canada!

Sincerely,
uncoordinated white guys

And then there's the comment from "safety from copyright dance" who composed some lyrics to a tune you might recognize:

We can dance if we want to.
If we leave these copyrights behind.
'Copyrights wont let us dance and if we can't dance.
Well, then we'll leave them behind.

Damn. Now I can't get that song out of my head.

The second pair of posts deal with the insane claim by the US Commerce Department that the fact that Steve Jobs had a bunch of patents and made some cool devices, proved that the patent system was great. An Anonymous Coward built on the fact that the details of the DOC's report that it was defending, showed that it claimed that the largest employer of "IP intensive" jobs was "grocery stores," and made the obvious connection:

Every time I go to a grocery store I thank Steve Jobs.

Similarly, OC, suggested some other correlations that made just about as much sense:

Ok, so Steve Jobs had a lot of patents. He also had lots of black turtle necks. And pancreatic cancer. Clearly, to succeed all innovators need to dress in black and develop a deadly illness of their choice.

What will those crazy cats at the Commerce Department think of next?