Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the example-39 dept

Alana rocked the most insightful comment of the week according to you, the voters, with a comment on our story about how much of the popularity of Psy’s Gangnam Style came about because no one was trying to enforce copyright restrictions on people:

Funny story, yesterday I was thinking of pointing to Gangnam Style as an example of what would happen if things WEREN’T region blocked all to hell.

Imagine if it were only available in Korea. Would it have blown to this level of popularity? No.

Example #39 why region blocking is a stupid idea.

We’re only up to 39?

Coming in a strong second was a comment on the same post by an Anonymous Coward, who had a very simple, but very accurate statement about the popularity of Gangnam Style:

This got popular because he let people make it popular for him.

Exactly.

Moving on to editor’s choice, we’ll start with this excellent response by Dark Helmet, to the story we had about the couple and photographer who were suing an anti-gay marriage organization, PAUS, for using one of their engagement photos in bigoted campaign ads. While we found the use despicable, I wrote that I was concerned that the emotional response might blind people to the legal questions, and that’s how bad precedent gets set, and DH expanded on that point:

That’s the important part. It’s very easy to allow emotional reactions to dominate, and those emotional reactions are almost always, to some degree, wrong due to the coloration of emotion. The appropriate avenue for attack here is NOT copyright, though, like you, I’m less appalled by it or the likeness rights plea.

But again, the appropriate attack vector is to highlight the bigotry and pure idiocy of PAUS. I would simply request, in a public forum, “why did you feel it was okay to use this picture of two private people this way?”

I suspect, unfortunately, that the true answer lies somewhere in the realm of “because we don’t consider them people”. And FUCK PAUS for that. But in an age of relative enlightenment when it comes to gay rights, better to simply highlight the stupid and make them toxic than soil the morality of man by getting our stupid legal system involved in it….

And then we’ve got fogbugzd’s very accurate explanation for why some people still can’t recognize that people use online services because they get value out of the, and not because they’re being exploited:

Modern business executives see everything as a zero-sum game; if someone else is making money then I must be loosing. Zero-sum thinking and the failure to understand basic economics are the hallmarks of the modern board room.

Over to the funny side of things, because I can tell you could use a good laugh today, we’ve got an Anonymous Coward responding to the Maine Republican Party insisting that a Democratic candidate for state senate must be lazy because she plays World of Warcraft. AC had only a slightly different line of reasoning:

Clearly she is a lazy person though. This World of Warcraft character demonstrates it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I mean, she’s playing an Assassination rogue. That’s the easiest spec of the most cheap-sauce class in the game. What a lazy, lazy player.

Now if she was playing a protection warrior or a healer or something though – that would be a different story.

Coming in a very close second is DannyB discussing his thoughts on WIPO brand toilet tissue:

I always immediately think, just for a moment, that WIPO must be a brand of bathroom tissue until I remember what it stands for. Then I remember that it is not something that is worthy or deserving of being elevated to such a usage.

Moving on to editor’s choice, we’ve got Josh in CharlotteNC responding to Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that shutting down Megaupload was “one of the largest criminal copyright cases in US history” in that the DOJ “indicted two corporations and seven individuals.” Something didn’t add up:

2 companies and 7 people is the largest ever criminal copyright case?

Wow, sure sounds like piracy is such a staggering problem that has destroyed an entire industry. This certainly justifies the millions of government tax dollars being spent on it.

Just imagine when we get more than New Zealand to help! We could go after 3 companies and 9 individuals! That will be a case for the record books.

Stay patient, Josh, I’m sure it’s coming.

And, finally, we’ve got an Anonymous Coward comment responding to Rep. Mike Rogers claiming that he can’t sleep at night, because he’s learned of a top secret super scary “unusual source” that is trying to threaten the country, which is why we all need to pass his overreaching CISPA law. The AC took a pretty good guess at who this “unusual source” might be:

Does he mean the public?

Seems like as good a guess as any… So, while you, the public, keep Mike Rogers up at night, we’re getting back to work on new stories that will (I’m sure) keep someone else up all night this week…