Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the so-they-say dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with an understandably frustrated call for better penalties when cops abuse their power such as the bogus case against a Nevada man recently dismissed by the courts:

‘No offloading this to the city, YOUR wallet’s on the line.’

If the case is so blatantly, obviously corrupt that the court is willing to state flat out that it’s clearly vindictive, sure would be nice if any penalties levied out were levied personally, rather than just another case of ‘Let’s screw the taxpayers while the guilty party walks.’

Everyone involved, up to and including the judge, should be hit with a hefty financial penalty for their actions here, one directed at them personally. Anything less and the court will once again be making it clear that ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘penalties for abuse of power’ are for the little people, and don’t apply to those with badges or robes.

In second place, it’s an anonymous response to a commenter making the absurd claim that the Mueller investigation “hasn’t gotten anywhere near Trump”:

Correct. Zero indictments of anything related to Trump.

George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser (aka coffee boy)

Paul Manafort, Trump?s former campaign chair (aka coffee boy)

Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign aide and Manafort?s longtime junior business partner (aka coffee boy)

Michael Flynn, Trump?s former national security adviser (coffee boy)

13 Russian nationals and three Russian companies (coffee suppliers)

Richard Pinedo (got caught making coffee wrong)

Alex van der Zwaan (Rick Gates’ coffee boy)

Konstantin Kilimnik, longtime business associate of Manafort and Gates (coffee boy)

12 Russian GRU officers (coffee boys)

Michael Cohen, Trump?s former lawyer (coffee boy)

Sam Patten, A GOP lobbyist who had worked in some of the same Ukrainian circles as Manafort and alongside Konstantin Kilimnik (coffee boy)

All just coffee-related workers, fetching, pouring, and delivering coffee. Persecuted because fuck coffee.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Agammamon posing a question to DRM-peddlers:

Someone should ask the Denuvo guys “if each stolen copy is a lost sale, then how come no one made massively more money when you rolled out Denuvo? How come the sales needle barely twitched? In all the years that you’ve been ‘protecting’ that release window, how come titles with DRM aren’t seeing massively more sales than titles without?”

Along similar lines, we’ve got PaulT responding to complaints about streaming service password sharing:

“It’s people consuming something they haven’t paid for.”

No, it’s not. Your customer has paid to have streaming to their devices. The product is paid for. You don’t get to be paid multiple times for the same service because you don’t like the way people use it.

If I buy a DVD and then let someone else watch my copy when I’ve done with it, that doesn’t mean that a copy has been pirated. If I give my copy of a newspaper to the next guy in the break room, that doesn’t mean a publisher is owed money If I let someone use my car while I’m at work, that doesn’t mean a rental company is owed money, It’s just the way life works.

If you think that it’s not, it’s no wonder you’re seeing failing business, as you’re chasing shadows.

“”By the content companies going over the top without having the experience of being distributors, they?ve done that in a way without securing their content”

No, they really haven’t. You need a valid login to access the content – *somebody* is paying for that access. According to the account, you will be restricted as to how you can access the content, be that which items are downloadable, how many devices or locations can be streamed from at once, etc. The content itself is secured, you just don’t like the fact that someone can pay Netflix to have 3 friends access it simultaneously without collecting an extra ransom.

But, they ARE getting paid for that access.

“The reality is television can be had fairly easy without paying for it.”

Welcome to… well, both the advent of free to air television before you were born and the reality of the marketplace you’re operating in.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is A Non-Mouse accepting our challenge to insert your own joke about the Satanic Temple’s copyright lawsuit against Netflix:

Three copyright trolls walk into a Satanic Temple. Baphomet says “Welcome home!”

In second place, it’s an anonymous response to UCLA’s latest attack against a critic’s website:

Headline

Website critical of UCLA adds additional way in which UCLA sucks with evidence courtesy of UCLA.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, first up it’s ryuugami with another response to Denuvo’s “every download is a lost sale” attitude:

Let’s be fair, at least they said “potential” loss.

In other news, my potential loss of revenue from not buying a lottery ticket is at $10,000,000 or so. Can Denuvo help me with that?

And finally, we’ve got a short anecdote from Thad about people who tell celebrities to stay in their non-politics lane:

My grandma once forwarded me an e-mail ranting about how these Hollywood celebrities should shut up and stay out of politics.

It closed with a quote by President Reagan.

That’s all for this week, folks!