Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the oregon-trial dept

This week was surprisingly slow for funny votes, with the overall score of insightful comments rocketing past them. Nevertheless, there are lots of great comments, so let’s get started with first place for insightful — a simple response from silverscarcat to the idea that copyright duration is truly “limited” in any meaningful way:

I’m sorry, but if something is under Copyright from before I’m born until well after I will likely be alive, then, it doesn’t matter if there *IS* a limit, for me, it’s eternal.

And that is why I do not support copyright, it is eternal, regardless of what is said.

(Furthermore, the fact that retroactive extensions have happened in the past renders the current limits utterly meaningless, as the government has already demonstrated that it is not committed to holding up its end of the bargain with the public.)

In second place, we’ve got a response to an even battier notion — giving creators huge cellphone discounts as a way to compensate them for the free consumption of their work. Violynne suggested the alternative, which artists seeking handouts never seem to consider:

Here’s a better idea, Jarre: Work. For. Goddamn. Hire.

The rest of us have to do it, what the hell makes artists any different?

This entitlement is the reason copyright maximalists keep pushing to steal (an appropriate use of the word here) more money from our wallets.

“Our” being the consumer.

Want me to pay for your work? Good luck with that, because I don’t pay for your “work”. I pay the middlemen who mark up your work and give you a pittance in return.

So stop whining. If you want more money, talk to your goddamn distributor and leave everyone else out of it.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ll start with one more related comment, this time on the subject of remixes and derivative works. When a bunch of big artists joined forces to fight a compulsory derivative license, insisting (ridiculously) that many artists would not release any work if they thought people might remix it (it’s not like artists are jostling each other for the privilege of being remixed by DJs with bigger followings or anything like that, right?), Ninja calmly offered a reply that appropriately amounts to “if that’s true, then good riddance”:

We accept the wealth of new creations in detriment of the possible “losses” suffered due to short sighted morons not releasing their works.

Signed,

Culture
Common sense

and specially

The People.

Next, we’ve got a short, interesting idea that was offered amidst this week’s discussion about strong passwords. Anyone who’s ever worked in an office with an IT department will likely appreciate this anonymous idea for encouraging stronger passwords:

perhaps we could reward users for making a stronger password by expiring it less often

Over on the funny side, first place comes from our post about the French privacy agency that DDOSd its own website by forcing Google to send it traffic that it wasn’t prepared to handle. The Mighty Buzzard made the joke that you just knew someone had to make:

Even their websites surrender.

In second place, we’ve got an anonymous response to the UK’s plans to start filtering extremist content online:

How can you not see that we have to do this in order to stop the spread of radical ideas promoting a social order that controls it’s members by restricting information and vilifying all those who disagree with their narrow views of what is acceptable.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, as is often the case, we’ve got a pair of comments sparked by failures. But not the failures of the NSA, or the MPAA, or an aging rocker or a young producer, but rather our own failure to catch some typos in out post about ASCAP’s collusion with record labels. First, when we accidentally dated an email in 2014 rather than 2013, before we could fix it, an anonymous commenter offered an explanation for the discrepancy:

Their email servers are probably also calibrated to use Hollywood math so even the timestamps on the servers are off.

Next, on that same post, we referred to the “trail transcript” between Pandora and ASCAP — a bizarre but intriguing notion that put one anonymous commenter in mind of a classic game:

They all died of dysentery.

Though we try to catch as many typos as possible here at Techdirt, it’s nice to know the ones that slip through can still serve a purpose. That’s all for this week, folks!