Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the said-and-done dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a summary of the situation with sites clamping down on sexual content, largely out of fear of FOSTA liability:

Ah, yes, America: a country where you can show someone?s head being sliced in half with a giant axe without people thinking twice about it, but you can barely show a glimpse of a woman?s bare breast in any context without ?think of the children?-type calls for censorship.

Christ, this country is repressed.

In second place, it’s an anonymous commenter with another point about that situation, specifically Amazon’s questionable takedown practice:

The problem I have is with them keeping any earned money when they terminate the account. That money should be paid.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment about sexual content takedowns, with Thad clarifying why this is different from the usual private platform situation when it comes to “censorship”:

I think the pertinent question here is, are these companies choosing not to associate with people saying these things because they’re worried about legal liability? Because if that’s the case, then there’s a pretty good argument that this is a government restriction on speech, not a private one.

Next, we’ve got PaulT with a reaction to learning that some Australian senators signed their problematic new social media/violent content bill without even reading it:

Sigh… I can understand emotional overreacting, but even the dumbest political should be made to read the things they try to make the rest of us obey before they sign it into law. Any law that’s passed should be null and void the moment the people with the job of reading it admit that they failed to do their job.

If I ran to sign contracts at work without reading the T&Cs because I had an emotional reaction to something, I’d at least be disciplined if that came out, if not fired. Even if the end result turned out to be what I assumed it would be, but especially if there were things in there that would needless cripple the work of colleagues. Why not these people?

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Rocky with a response to another commenter’s quip that EU lawmakers — having slipped and admitted that Article 13 will force sites to have upload filters — might wake up to a horse head in the bed:

And then Paramount will sue them for infringement because they “pirated” a scene from The Godfather…

In second place, we’ve got Bamboo Harvester arguing that a ridiculous report about the cost of photo piracy was just the tip of the iceberg:

You’re just not…

…doing the math right.

Each view is a theft.

Average person blinks 1,000 times a minute, so that’s 1,000 views per minute stolen.

Except… Most people have TWO eyes, so the number of views is doubled.

By their numbers, that’s 640,000 Euros per minute per person viewing any given image….

(Though in truth I don’t think the average person does, in fact, blink seventeen times per second.)

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a comment from ArkieGuy about the same report, wondering if our commentary on some of its content was bolstering its message:

So, does TechDirt have a license for that fancy chart? If not, today’s number just went up by ?532.5! /s

Next, we’ve got Get off my cyber-lawn! hitting the report’s inflated numbers with a classic callback:

The author must have studied economics at Prenda U!

That’s all for this week, folks!