That Anonymous Coward's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the no,-not-that-one dept

No, not that Anonymous Coward, but That Anonymous Coward is handling this week's favorites....

Everyone on board the short bus!

I'm your tour guide, That Anonymous Coward but you can call me TAC.

So I was as surprised as you now are, when Mike asked me to write the Favorites of the Week post, but like moss I grow on you, given a chance. Everyone buckle up and lets review the short week as we ride the short bus.

If you look to your left, you can see Facebook whining because someone made their button illegal in Germany. They seem to be bothered that it is no longer the awesome tracker (read: money machine) they intended it to be. Who cares about silly laws, this is Facebook we are talking about.

Coming up on the right, just past the smoke from the fire and brimstone burning in the moat, you can just catch sight of the MPAA offices. After getting a court to decide the length of the cable matters in determining infringement, they then decided to put out some more "unique" uses of math showing losses to "piracy". They really aren't trying very hard any more to look remotely serious in their statements.

Now we turn the corner and zut alors! - France has decided Copyright is more important than Human Rights. I guess when you're sleeping with a model/singer you get a little confused. Oh and if you can't get the people to lay down to accept you screwing their rights, just sneak it in. (And let us not forget that they violate copyright when its convenient for them.)

Hold tight as we speed up to get past the villagers getting their pitchforks and torches ready to pay a visit to the capitol... and on your left we have, no wait, look away.... nothing to see here.... just making sure there are no terrorists hiding inside that nice lady's vagina.

And now we come to the Copyright Troll Cul-de-sac, over there you can see the new house being built by lawyers representing a religious group. It seems they were upset over some former members saying unkind things online. They couldn't get their names as they forced material down, so they filed for a copyright and boom the doors opened wide. Copyright is a great tool for bypassing those silly freedoms people expect.

Oh there is a moving van over at the USCG McMansion. They are considering shopping for a court that will blindly rubber stamp their lawsuit so they can "settle" with alleged copyright infringers. Little known fact: one of their clients is Uwe Boll, voted the worst director in history. Even Uwe saw the benefit in turning one of his "fantastic" films into box office gold by scaring people into paying on fairly questionable evidence.

And Swatch, this odd little shack seems just jammed into the neighborhood. We record our announcements so we can claim copyright if you report too much. This makes only slightly more sense than getting arrested for filming cops in public.

This little burned out quonset hut is the EMI "ranch". It used to be nice, and there were hopes the new owners would fix the property up. Instead they have some lawyers chasing kids out of their yard.

Holy Hell!... A huge new section has been added to the Cul-de-sac, as if overnight it just sprung up before our eyes. It's as if someone waved a magic wand and made every copyright holder's wet dream come true. Those fires burning over there?... Oh those are just the things now made illegal by the public domain being gutted.

Because it's my tour, I want to give a shout out to Steele Hansmeier LLC and their little stick house. So what if its on Ars... its my tour and I'm driving. Why yes your honor, we lied when we said the IP address would let us name the infringer... now let me search all the computers in the house because he refuses to settle. We'll huff and we'll puff and we'll blow our own damn house down.

Oopsie the cul-de-sac's private security force, those nice officers from ICE, are taking aim at us, and so we drive on....

Hey is that a wrecking ball heading towards the Cul-de-sac? I think that is being driven by Judge Bernard Zimmerman. He seems to be heading towards one of the smaller houses.

Look over there, ohh sweet a double rainbow... what does it mean? Yeah, I don't understand, and neither does he.

Who here is from America, no hands... ummm I can tell some of you are pretending to be Canadian, I can understand why. When we aren't secretly forcing other countries to do things we can't do here, and shilling for Microsoft, we are getting the money flowing back here... for content holders...making laws up as we go along... just to support those who don't pay their fair share... and want everyone else to pay to protect their content.... Well, I dunno what to say about that, eh?

Oh crap, pretending to be Canadian won't cut it any more. What else can we pretend to be?

*bump bump*

Oops sorry folks, just a speed bump as we run over Ubisoft screwing their customers yet again and finding new ways to fail.

And that gleaming spire there on the horizon... that's the number of "Patriot Act Warrant Requests", I guess drugs are terrorists too.... It is ok give us unlimited powers with no oversight or responsibility... we won't misuse it... Trust Us.

Intellectual Property is our greatest asset, it is a great slogan on that billboard over there. The shame is, they seem to only want to apply that to some people's IP. When the people who actually make the new jobs, instead of cling to a crap business model, are against it, isn't it worthy of some debate? If you really wanted to fix the whole problem with Imagin... I mean Intellectual Property, shouldn't you keep people from having to find new way to do the same thing each time?

And here we are... safe and sound at home again. I hope you enjoyed the tour as much as I did giving it. Thank you Mike for the use of the bus, and letting me take your readers hosta... I mean for a ride. It shouldn't take much to get the steering column repaired from me hot-wiring it.

I am and remain....

TAC

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