Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the look-who's-talking dept
There were plenty of high-voted (though not record-breaking) comments this week, with several that were crossover hits in both the funny and insightful categories—so let's dive right in. Up first on the Insightful side, we've got Liz on our post about police in Finland raiding a home to seize a 9-year-old girl's Winnie the Pooh laptop over a file-sharing accusation. Liz picked up on a quote from the original Torrentfreak article, and pointed out what it sounds like:
“It would have been easier for all concerned if you had paid the compensation,” the police advised
There's a word for this. That word is Extortion.
In second place, we've got a comment on our post about the ongoing pay-to-link nonsense that Google is battling in Germany. BentFranklin got lots of insightful and funny votes by providing some shampoo bottle instructions for those who dislike Google:
Don't like Google monetizing other peoples' content? You have options!
Step 1: Here is a list of all German newspaper sites:
http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/germany.htm
Have fun! What, is that too much clicking?
Step 2: Just write a script to visit each one for you and give you one page with all the headlines. What, is it too hard?
Step 3: Pay someone else write that script? What, is it too expensive?
Step 4: What if someone else did it and gave you the results free and got but paid with advertising? Okay here it is:
http://news.google.com
What, you don't like Google?
Step 5: Go to Step 1.
For our editor's choice comments, we've got a one-two punch from that same post. First, fogbugzd presented a great analogy for the argument of the German newspapers:
Next up: Taxi drivers have to pay a fee to business when they drop off customers.
Then an anonymous commenter expanded on the concept, arriving at a pleasing conclusion that, sadly, probably won't work out when you're heading home from the bar:
This is a brilliantly apt analogy. Taxi drivers derive all of their revenue from people wanting to go places. Obviously the fact that business are operating in such a way that people want to take taxi services to those businesses is a benefit that those businesses are providing to the taxi drivers, and the taxi drivers should be baying compensation directly to the places people are asking to take them.
Therefore, the taxi services should take me home for free, because I want to go there. Because if I hadn't taken the intelligent business decision to set up my home at a place I wanted to go home to, that taxi driver wouldn't have any reason to take me there in the first place.
On the funny side, and leading by a significant amount, we start with a comment on our open letter to Human Synergistics in response to a copyright complaint. While the truth is we prefer positive news and would rather never be tasked with responding to legal stupidity, it can't be denied that there's something cathartic about smacking down attempted copyfraud, so it's no surprise that our readers rallied behind S. T. Stone and his take on the letter:
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the new textbook definition of 'served'.
For second place, we go back to the story about the police raid in Finland, where Michael had some thoughts about the Winnie the Pooh laptop:
Shouldn't Disney be responsible for the misuse of their laptops?
They should be taking preventative measures with their laptops to prevent unauthorized uses. If they don't, they should at least be paying the content industry a fee to produce such tools of piracy.
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start with a comment on Tim Cushing's post about Andrew Piper's longwinded condemnation of ebooks. Dave Xanatos talked about his personal approach:
This is why I print all of the techdirt posts that come out and write out my comments for my assistant to type them in here for me.
Refreshing to get the new comments costs a fortune in ink, however.
And, finally, we'll revisit our open letter as well. Gwiz adapted the format of the Human Synergistics exercise and applied it to the situation at hand:
Let's make our own derivative version:
Your company is about to commit copyfraud upon another company and your team has 5 minutes to grab whatever they can from this list of items before the internet catches wind of it and your company goes down in flames:
- Your current resumes
- The house plant on your desk
- A stapler
- A copy of your 401k plan
- A roll of toilet paper
- The number to the unemployment office
- Parking validation stamp
- Personal family photos
- The weird Burger King toy on the IT guy's desk
- That cute blonde in Accounting's phone number
- The chipped coffee cup that's now growing Penicillin
That's all for this week—keep the great comments coming!
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This reminds me of a situation at my job. There was a guy parking illegally in a handicap spot. I called the towing company. I found out later that it's common to charge the business to have cars towed away. That seems ripe for competition. Towing companies should want to advertise free towing and then offset their whole cost to the captive audience of the towed.
Anyways, kind of related.
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Re: Winnie the Pooh
It's worth pointing out that if that laptop had been stolen, even if it had tracking software on it, they would have had a hell of a time getting the police to do anything with the case, much less raid someone's home.
So if a private citizen requests assistance from police in the case of a criminal theft of 1000s of dollars merchandise, they get nothing. If a big company requests the assistance of the police in a case of a couple dollars worth of civil copyright infringement, full police raid.
Seems fair.
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The following is sarcasm, in case it's not clear enough
It may only be worth a few bucks when bought legally, but when it comes to going after pirates, those 'few bucks' turns into 'a couple hundred thousand'.
So looking at it that way, of course the police would go nuts on the downloader, and ignore the theft of a computer. The first is a crime involving potentially millions of dollars worth of 'stolen goods', while the latter is just dealing with items worth a couple of hundred, at most.
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...why... they'd NEVER make a living that way!!!!
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1.) Refuse to sell goods digitally in a convenient format
2.) Let others figure out how to make consumption of your goods as easy and enjoyable as possible, but make sure they are thoroughly demonized and illegal
3.) Average user resorts to the illegal, easier solution
4.) Sue average user for way way way more than any sane person would ever consider spending on your goods.
This way, instead of making "digital dimes" off of their catalogs, the majors can make "litigated fistfuls of sweet, filthy lucre."
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