Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the winning-streak dept

That One Guy is back again, this time with both the first and second place wins on the insightful side. First up, it’s his response to Sony Music’s takedown of a lecture on music copyright:

99.9% accuracy… .01% of the time

This also serves to highlight even more the utterly absurd claims by maximalists that excessive and stringent ‘copyright protections’ aren’t a problem for non-pirates because mistakes are so very rare. If something that is clearly an example of fair use can be pulled then pretty much anything can be, on nothing more than a blind assertion, ‘That’s infringing’ without a single care to actually check if it is first.

Those that object to their actions and methods don’t do so because they’re siding with the pirates, as the maximalists like to claim, but because the maximalists have shown time and time again that they have no interest in avoiding collateral damage. If protecting ‘legitimate’ speech requires ‘protecting pirates’, as is the case, then the maximalists have only their complete indifference to accuracy to blame.

In second place, it’s his thoughts on the irony of CBS failing at streaming the Grammy’s while vilifying Spotify:

You first

As one of the linked articles show, the biggest reason streaming services ‘don’t pay artists enough’ is because the labels take a huge cut, leaving the artists a tiny portion (45.6% to labels, 6.8% to artists in the study, a study paid for by the recording industry mind). There’s also the fact that anyone that expects a single listen to pay even remotely as much as a permanent purchase is a greedy idiot of the highest order, but we’ll ignore that for the moment.

If the labels are really going to whine about how streaming services just don’t pay artists enough, then they’re more than welcome to hand over some of their share, but given their complaints have absolutely nothing to do with how much the artists are getting, and everything to do with how much the labels are getting, I don’t imagine they’d be very eager to start doing that.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out by looping back to the Sony takedown story, where one anonymous commenter suggested that the professor should have known his lecture would trigger a ContentID alert, and another pointed out how entirely irrelevant that is:

So what you are saying is that people cannot make use of fair use rights, because contentid cannot deal with it.

Next, after we discovered that a quiet “legal scrub” of the TPP had actually resulted in huge changes, another anonymous commenter nicely expressed the sort of suspicion this provokes:

The conspiracy enthusiast in me wonders about a “midnight revision” ala Mitch Glazier.

The paranoid conspiracy enthusiast in me wonders if the entire TPP was purposely written such that the meaning of several critical sections could be changed with the “cleanup” of single words.

Over on the funny side, we’ve got a pair of jokes that some might consider to be in poor taste, but more around here clearly consider to be hilarious. You’ve been warned. In first place, after Apple was ordered to help the FBI get into the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, TechDescartes quickly assembled a joke on a classic template:

A magistrate judge, an Apple employee, and an FBI agent agree to meet at a local bar. Only the Apple employee makes it. Why? Because the bar didn’t have a back door.

In second place, after Karl asked of AT&T’s failure to upgrade its networks following its purchase of DirecTV “are we feeling the amazing merger synergies yet?”, Michael had a quick answer:

Yes we are. Some lube would be nice.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, since we was tearing up the charts this week, we’ve got two more comments from TechDescartes. First, after John Brennan attempted to claim that encryption stopped the CIA from preventing the Paris attacks (despite a lot of evidence that most of the important communications were unencrypted), he suggested an explanation:

So the CIA cannot decrypt plaintext French?

Finally, in another response to the Grammy’s digital failings, he laid it out nice and simple:

Can’t
Be
Streamed

That’s all for this week, folks!