Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the not-so-fast dept

This week’s comments almost all share the same theme: calling people out on errors, inconsistencies, ironies and other gaffes. When an analyst expressed concern that true wireless broadband competition would do exactly what it’s supposed to do and drive prices down, That One Guy took most insightful comment of the week by pointing out the underlying admission in his statement:

So simply having to compete on price is supposedly enough to cause a 20 billion dollar drop in revenue… I wonder if he realizes that he pretty much just said that the current players are hosing the public over for $20 billion due to their duopoly position?

Next, we’ve got a rather interesting type of comment… There are those who question the value of anonymous comments, and others who question the value of quotation and reuse — but Christopher Best combined the two and took not only second place for insightful, but first place for funny as well. Because sometimes, as was the case with Valve’s anti-cheat system, someone else already said it best:

Best commentary I saw on this was from an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot:

I trust Valve more than the NSA.
The NSA doesn’t protect me against hackers.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out on our post debunking the ridiculous idea that the public domain is preventing the preservation of film. That One Guy gets another hat-tip this week for pointing out that if preservation is the real issue, there’s a far more obvious target:

If they’re truly worried about works ‘disappearing’, then their top priority should be fixing the Orphan Works problem. Low quality recordings are rather overshadowed by no recordings of a work because no-one knows who owns the rights to it, making saving, backing it up, or restoring it legally dicey.

Wouldn’t even be a difficult fix either, just bring back the registration requirement to get a work protected by copyright law, and for current orphaned works, give a grace period, say 5 years, for the owner to come forward and claim them, releasing into the public domain any works that remain unclaimed at the end of the 5 years.

Next, when broadcasters fretted about preventing Aereo from “stealing” their signal, an anonymous commenter asked the simple question they’ll never be able to answer:

How can you “steal” something that’s being given away for free?

It’s always funny to hear people talk about copyright as property, and perhaps even funnier to hear them try to talk about radiant electromagnetic waves as though they were diamonds in a wall-safe.

Given that, let’s head over to the funny side. We’ve already had our number one comment from Christopher above. For second place, we head to the post about House of Cards piracy, where Ninja decided to answer our rhetorical question:

but given the fact that it appears almost no one does that search, why should they bother?

Because reasons. PIRACY. And terrorism. Also, the children (is it suitable for children?).

Editor’s Choice for funny goes to a pair of similar comments from different anonymous commenters. Perhaps it’s a tad morbid to choose two jokes about death and tragedy, but sometimes dark satire is the best delivery system for a biting and relevant point. First up, a response to our post about deaths among cell-phone tower climbers that highlights just how good we are at inventing imaginary problems while ignoring real ones:

Seems like proof
… that cell phones do kill people.

Finally, in response to the tragic story about a 17-year-old being killed by police because he had a Wii controller in his hand, this similar comment glibly underlines the pathetic fact that our society won’t make this kind of problem a top priority, but will likely continue making political spectacle out of simulated violence:

More proof that video games turn people into violent murderers.

Uniforms and badges seem to help, too.

That’s all for this week, folks!