Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

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from the pressing-on dept

This week, it should come as no surprise that Tim Cushing’s epic post about the OnPress attribution trolling saga yielded our runaway winning comment of the week, taking first place in both the Insightful and Funny categories by a wide margin. It comes courtesy of an anonymous commenter who highlighted the simple but massive irony of the situation surrounding Shaun Shane’s poem:

I enjoy the irony of someone being a complete jerk regarding a quote about being polite and civil.

Second place on the Insightful side goes to Josef Anvil on our post about an Australian court finally wising up when it comes to Google’s third-party liability. Josef broke things down to basics:

I just don’t understand why this is so confusing for people. Fact #1: The internet is a COMMUNICATION platform, just like the telephone.

Fact#2 Google is NOT the internet, it’s a search engine. It indexes websites like the card catalogue in a library.

Is that so hard to comprehend?

If you wouldn’t sue your phone company for the misconduct of its users then you shouldn’t sue internet service providers for the same thing. If you wouldn’t sue your library because someone left misleading advertising on display in public, then you shouldn’t sue Google for the same thing.

NB: The internet is not some magical thing that turns shit that we already know how to do into new patents.

For editor’s choice, we start out on our post about national firewall rumblings in Iceland. PaulT took on an absurd quote from Iceland’s interior minister:

“But surely if we can send a man to the moon, we must be able to tackle porn on the internet.”

That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen a politician say, which has to be a new record. For many reasons, but I’ll focus on the two most obvious:

First, define “porn”. You can’t. It’s a totally subjective term. Sure, hardcore penetrative sex might be unquestionably porn, but what about mere nudity? If so, how much nudity? Does the definition of such change depending on whether the subject is young or old, male or female? Going to the moon is easy by comparison – it’s a clearly defined goal, the only hard part is working out how. With blocking porn, you can’t even tie down an objective since every Icelandic citizen will have a different idea of what “porn” is.

Secondly, the issue is not blocking porn, it’s how to do it accurately without destroying perfectly legitimate material. Every attempt to implement any such block *always* stops non-pornographic material and *always* leaves some porn unblocked. On top of that, even if you somehow managed to accurately block every time, that one horny teenager is going to find a way to route around said blocks and then it’s completely ineffective. Yes, that includes offline methods, which you’re not going to be able to block – I shudder to think of some of the unintended consequences.

Oh, and from the original (urgh) Daily Mail article that the Mashable link is referring to:

“This move is not anti-sex. It is anti-violence because young children are seeing porn and acting it out”

Sounds like you have a *parenting* problem… Just another “for the children!” excuse for implementing censorship on adults.

Next, we go to our post about Bjork’s Kickstarter “failure”, where an anonymous commenter noted how that word isn’t quite right for the situation:

This was not a “failure!”

Platforms like Kickstarter have changed the way the market is functioning, and our ways of thinking about it (even here on Techdirt) have to catch up.

Bjork’s campaign did not fail, even though the results were not what she was hoping for. She successfully learned that the market was not interested in this product.

Spending ?375,000 of her own money? Now THAT would have been a failure.

Using Kickstarter is more like running a science experiment than it is like selling a product. It increases the efficiency of the market by orders of magnitude, and apparently beyond our ability to think about it clearly.

On the Funny side, we’ve already had our first place comment, so we’ll move on to number two—and what do you know, it’s not only also from the OnPress post, but from Tim Cushing himself. In this case, it was a response to a comment from one of our often-confused trolls, whose grasp on the subject matter seemed tenuous at best:

Bob –

Pretend this post is an anatomically-correct doll. Show me on the post where you stopped reading.

For Editor’s Choice on the funny side, the first choice comes in response to Chris Dodd’s latest comments, where That Anonymous Coward noticed a particular quote and realized that this is likely a classic case of PEBKAC:

“We can and must have an Internet that works for everyone”

So that is the source of the problem, he can’t figure out how to use the internet.

And finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t make a nod to the comment thread on our post about Chubby Checker, but in this case the award goes to Oblate for bucking the obvious trend with one of the few family-friendly jokes in the entire thread, responding to another commenter’s self-confessed typo problem:

Next time use a Chubby Spellchecker.

And with that, we’re done! See you next week.