Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the two-great-tastes dept

Step on up, Killer_Tofu, you won this week's most insightful comment (by a landslide) with a gem of a response to the MPAA's bizarre attack on a reporter who merely pointed out that a combination of a bad economy and dumb moves by movie studios might lead more people to unauthorized means of access. Killer_Tofu pointed out some additional problems with the MPAA's Alex Swartsel's blog post:

There are a few additional things I would like to point out here.

1) She mentions that people are not just stealing, but profiting.
... including posting it online and making money from ad sales or subscription fees?
She seems to be confused as to how most online services work. It is the users who generally upload or point to content and all the website does is offer a service or directory. This shows a pretty solid lack of understanding as to how most to all of them work. This lack of understanding falls perfectly in line with the statements they love to make in lawsuits and other posts.

2) Also directly from the quote above in point 1, ad sales hardly ever generate any profit. They usually cover costs plus or minus a very small amount. Again, showing a basic lack of knowledge as to how websites tend to operate.

3) The tags for her blog post includes "Rogue Sites" but the only sites she mentions directly are yours and GigaOm. I certainly hope that isn't their intention but it seems to me like they might actually be stupid enough to label you guys as Rogue Sites. They have labeled sites rogue sites for dumber reasons than that. (Especially when they seem to falsely believe that you guys are completely and unconditionally condoning infringement)

4) She did state this as well:
A major benefit of our new agreement with Internet Service Providers is that it will help consumers get more information about why copyright is important and the impact of content theft.
Aside from calling it theft there (I believe Mike made the point well enough above) this is an incredibly misleading line in and of itself. It shows complete contempt for both consumers of content as well as all internet subscribers in general. That agreement is one of the worst agreements I have ever heard of. They won't tell us how their process works. They won't let you respond until you've been accused a lot. Your responses are limited to a small radio button list. And to top it off, they want us to pay just to say "I am not guilty of your false accusations". (This is not an exhaustive paragraph of everything wrong with that agreement)

And they wonder why nobody likes them and customers are perfectly willing to move on into the digital age without them. Sheesh

Second place was a very close race, but taking the prize by a nose and a vote is an Anonymous Coward, responding to a critic on the post about how many DMCA notices YouTube gets. That critic totally missed the point, by saying that so many notices means that YouTube "might have an idea" that the site is used by some to infringe. This AC pointed out how silly a statement that is in context:

Yes, they know that some people are using the service to infringe. What, exactly, do you propose they do about this? Shut down? That would be counterproductive, because some other site would pop up to fill the gap - and THAT site might decide to base themselves in some country with less restrictive copyright laws. If that happened, you could say goodbye to DMCA takedown notices and any sort of screening. You could try to sue them, but good luck collecting from a company with no US connections.

Okay, on to editor's choice. We've got Nina Paley's response to police saying they can stop people if they think photographs they're taking have "no apparent esthetic value." Nina liked the sound of that, but not for the reasons you might think:

I'd totally go to a photography exhibit called "no apparent esthetic value." Especially if the "non-esthetic" photos were displayed next to "esthetic" ones, according to the police

And finally, we've got another Anonymous Coward, also responding to the MPAA's attacks by paraphrasing Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media:

• When confronted with a new medium, people tend to understand it in terms of old media.
• The people who are most adept at understanding an older medium are the least adept at understanding a new medium. Their intuitive sense of the older medium blocks them from sensing the new medium other than via false analogy.

As for funny, the winner by a decent margin was HothMonster, responding to my suggestions for Felicia Day on how video can be monetized in the internet era, by jumping in with a criticism we've heard a few times before:

Mike you can't just complain about they way things are being handled without ever offering any suggestions as....to...ho

shit wrong article

Coming in second was yet another Anonymous Coward (nice showing by the ACs this week!), with another response to the police/esthetic value question:

Does that mean police officers have "no apparent esthetic value" since you can't film or take pictures of them?

I think there's a logic error in there somewhere, but it's still funny. As for editor's choice, we've got two comments from people responding to people with interesting opinions that both made me chuckle. First up was dfed's response to some luddite complaining about how social media is killing ideas:

Suck it, grandpa. Foursquare says I'm mayor of your front lawn.

And, finally, we have yet another Anonymous Coward responding to first year associate lawyer Gregory Berry, who was fired from his law firm after emailing partners telling them he had a "superior legal mind" compared to others in the firm. Berry is now suing the firm for $77 million dollars. The whole case gave this AC a business idea:

I'm going to set up a kiosk outside this guy's house selling "I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am" t-shirts. I bet he'll buy my entire stock every day!

And, with that, I'll leave you to come up with your own t-shirts to sell.