Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the comment-distancing dept

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the patent troll “Labrador Diagnostics LLC” trying to block COVID-19 testing with help from the Monkey Selfie law firm. In first place, it’s That One Guy summing up how most people feel:

No ‘your money OR your life’ but ‘Your money AND their lives.’

It takes a truly special kind of scum to decide that the best time to try to shake someone down is in the middle of a medical crisis, and the best target for that is a company trying to provide tools to help in said crises.

I’d say name and shame until they slink back into the cesspits they crawled from but if this is what they consider acceptable work I can only assume that they are literally incapable of feeling shame, so instead show the world how utterly vile they are in the hopes that no-one in the future is insane enough to want to have anything to do with them.

In second place, it’s an anonymous commenter suggesting what the response should be in the long term:

If this doesn’t prompt a good, hard look at the patent system and patent trolling, nothing will.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with Avatar28 who had another suggestion:

Do you want your patents seized for the public good?

Cause this is how you get your patents seized for the public good.

Next, it’s Andrew with a response to our post asking whether Wall Street would get in the way of Jack Dorsey’s plans to make Twitter an open protocol:

The short termers

I work for a decently mid-sized cutting-edge technology company that Elliott Management owns a stake in. For years they have been trying to tell us how to run our business. That advice is 99% of the time about quarterly returns and not about long term strategic investment in growth and technology. Half of the time, it is exactly about sacrificing long term growth in the name of scooping out money now.

I can understand that shareholders have an interest in how the company is working, but… if they don’t like how we’re working and don’t think they’ll make enough money, go buy some other stock! The people who run our company are knowledgeable and passionate about our technology and where it’s going. Elliott doesn’t have a clue, and that doesn’t seem to matter to them.

So far, our company has managed to tell them to go pound sand (ever so politely, I assume). We’ve been hiring as opposed to laying off, and getting our engineering groups back into fighting shape to take on our technology challenges. Let’s hope that can continue.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is JoeCool with a response to the simple question of how a valve is patented:

It has rounded corners. 😉

In second place, it’s David with one more response to Labrador Diagnostics:

So what?

Look, filing a copyright suit for a monkey and filing a patent infringement lawsuit for a Labrador are not all that much different.

I’d not be surprised if they represent the trademark interests of a caterpillar. Wait, that one’s taken already.

For editoir’s choice on the funny side, we start out with DannyB and a suggestion about privacy and encryption:

We need government mandated ROT17.

“The government selected ROT17 because two applications of it will not revert the ciphertext back to plain text.”, the senator explained.

“…and furthermore”, the senator added, “we chose ROT17 because 17 is a prime number unlike 13.”

And last but not least, we have one final response to the COVID-19 patent troll from an anonymous commenter:

Martin Shkreli: something something Daraprim.
Labrador Diagnostics: Hold my stool sample

That’s all for this week, folks!