Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the said-and-done dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the EU’s new office in Silicon Valley that aims to work with tech companies on EU law compliance:

I know it won’t happen because money, but the tech companies really need to just stop trying to placate these people.

If a country passes laws that make it too onerous to do business there, the company needs to just say “If that’s how you want it, then we won’t do business here anymore” and leave.

I mean, the EU is always saying they want to give European tech companies a chance to compete, right? Surely companies would step up if Twitter/Facebook/Google/Microsoft/whoever was gone?

And if the EU citizens have a problem with that, they can speak with their vote.

In second place, it’s That One Guy with a comment about the normalization of copyright as a tool for censorship:

Ask yourself, ‘Would I be fine with my worst enemy using this?’

Even if you agree that the law was abused ‘correctly’ this time around if this becomes the accepted norm it’s not will it be used by someone you don’t like to prevent a recording that could be very important but how soon, because if you don’t think that politicians and other powerful figures won’t be all over a guaranteed way to prevent people from recording what they’re saying/doing you really haven’t been paying attention.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another comment on that issue, this time from Rekrul:

Maybe the people playing music in public to stop people from recording them need to get hit with settlement demands for publicly performing said music. I would think that would stop this rather quickly.

Next, it’s an anonymous comment about California’s transparency bills:

These aren’t about transparency

These bills really have nothing to do with transparency.
They are nearly impossible to comply with by design. The goal of these bills is obviously to give state officials the ability to punish companies for hosting content they don’t like or for refusing to host content they do like. And they will be selectively enforced against smaller companies based on what content they host. Larger companies who can fight back will be targeted for political grandstanding purposes whenever it helps a political campaign. Suppression of free speech in the first case, and waste of taxpayer resources in the latter.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is a very sarcastic anonymous comment about the push for Google to stop filtering Republican political spam, and Marco Rubio’s realization that his own emails were being filtered because his email was misconfigured:

Exactly! This is clearly big tech revealing a deep, ingrained bias against the stupid, the ignorant, the lazy, and the selfish!

For years they’ve developed their “technology” with more and more buttons (to confuse) and switches (to confound) so that all the lazy, stupid people who can’t be bothered to learn new things are kept out of their walled gardens. This must end! Why do we need millions of colors when you could tell who was good or bad in the old Westerns using just black and white? It’s big tech and their fancy “color gamut” that’s ruining this generation!

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment about playing music to use copyright for censoring recordings, responding to David Hogg’s story about doing exactly that:

Hey Disney, someone has just admitted giving a public performance, presumably without a license.

(Though I’m not so sure we should normalize cheering about onerous copyright rules and aggressors like Disney as a way to fight the normalization of using copyright to censor, either.)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start with a response from David to the question of who will defend the books being sued by Virginia politicians:

The books have to speak for themselves.

Finally, it’s Toom1275 with a simple comment about the textbook publishing giant getting into the NFT space:

Non Functional Textbooks

That’s all for this week, folks!