Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

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from the redacted dept

It seems there are no lows to which the recording industry won’t sink, reaffirmed this week by a series of anti-piracy ads that exploit the tragic stories of dead (and highly successful) musicians. Violynne won most insightful comment of the week for an open letter to those who might be misled by this campaign:

Dear upcoming artists reading this article,

What you’re actually reading are the states caused by these performers and their record labels.

In a time before royalties (and it took a new copyright law to get them, by the way), these performers had no choice but to trust their labels, many of which withheld thousands, if not millions, from the artists which actually created the music.

Their suffering had nothing to do with people stealing their music (trying to walk out with an LP tucked under the shirt isn’t easy).

Their suffering was due to lost revenue by the labels, most represented by the RIAA (whose sole purpose is to extort as much money from artists as possible).

Don’t fall for the ruse. Take a few months and learn business, economics, and the law so you can manage, market, and profit by yourself.

Because the second you take that advance and sign the dotted line, you’ll be hitting the bottle and pain killers too.

For second place, we head to the story of the DOJ dropping a case after being told it can’t simply seize laptops at the border. One anonymous commenter pointed out how telling this reaction is:

The government would rather drop a case against a serial killer if it meant saving them the ability to continue spy on others illegally.

Proof is this case, as well as the one where they dropped a kidnapping case just so they don’t unveil they were using Stingrays to catch the guy.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/08/23/baltimore-police-stingray-cell-surveillance/31994181/

Disgusting.

For editor’s choice, we start out on our post about another Techdirt post that disappeared from Google due to a right-to-be-forgotten request. One commenter asked when the last legitimate such request was made, and John Fenderson supplied a simple answer:

Never. There can’t possibly be a legit request since the entire idea is illegitimate.

Next, we head to the news of Universal’s humorless takedown of a parody Nirvana song, where Jef Oliver noted how much online culture can tell us about the entertainment industry:

Someone posts a video on the internet. Several comments say “Enjoy it before it is taken down.”

When your business is known for its over-aggressive copyright stance and not for the media it is supposed to be releasing, there is a problem.

Over on the funny side, our top two winners are extremely similar comment from the same post. There are a handful of people who like to accuse Techdirt of being a shill for Google, so when we criticized the company’s actions on net neutrality this week, the sarcastic responses came fast and racked up lots of funny votes. Both top winners were anonymous, so here’s first place:

but techdirt is such a google shill, how could they possibly speak badly of Google.

Oh, I get it now, Techdirt is a net neutrality shill. They shill on principle and for the public interest. How much is the public paying you Techdirt?

And here’s second place, which took a more deadpan approach:

Bunch of freaking Google shills. You just won’t shut up about how awesome Google is and how it can do no wrong, will you? Why don’t you freaking marry Google if you love it so much?

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out on our post about United in-flight wi-fi blocking certain news outlets. Someone commenting under the name United Wifi Content Police offered an in-character reaction:

Oh shit, we forgot to block Techdirt!

And finally, after documents on the tobacco industry were released as pages of solid black redactions, one anonymous commenter gave us a good blanket response for all similar freedom-of-information failures:

At least we are still free to read between the lines…

That’s all for this week, folks!