Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the the-invention-of-lying dept
As per usual, the latest copyright war of words (this one in the UK) came complete with a lot of misleading language and twisted ideas. TruthHurts scored first place for insightful this week by reminding everyone what copyright is for:
Copyrights aren't about passion or money.
Copyrights are about getting works into public domain after a reasonable period of time.
Only corporations have twisted it to mean money.
A lot of this week's discussion was focused on the claims of non-inventor of email Shiva Ayyadurai. Some people tried to compare Ayyadurai's nonsense with that old rumour about Al Gore claiming to have invented the internet. John Fenderson took second place for insightful by setting the record straight on that front:
There are two major problems with this comparison:
1) Gore never claimed to have invented the internet
2) When people started saying that he did claim that, he didn't devolve into batshit insanity in his attempt to continue to make a claim he never made in the first place.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start with tomczerniawski and another response to the UK Culture Secretary's comments:
“technology companies should be the partners of rights companies, not their masters” he says, while implicitly wishing for rights companies to become the masters of tech companies.
Meanwhile, with Deadmau5 picking on Disney to make a point about trademark hypocrisy, Tim R has noted that the double standard is already being exposed:
I think the real question to be asked here is why hasn't the entire domain been taken down yet. I mean, that is the correct and measured response that we've been told.
Isn't it?
Over on the funny side, first place goes to another reaction to the invention-of-email debacle — a simple, anonymous and inspired one:
I say we forward all spam to the inventor of email
Second place for funny comes from Michael in response to Ferrari's restrictive after-sale terms and conditions:
I was just about to buy one of those, but now that I read this, I'm going to get a Dodge Dart instead.
For editor's choice on the funny side, let's go ahead and grab two more responses to Shiva Ayyadurai. First we've got Crazy Canuck leaving the 56th comment on the post:
First comment
This is actually the first comment here as the first comment is defined as having a subject "First comment", starting with "This" and being exactly twenty nine words long.
And last but not least, after the Huffington Post claimed to have not received one of our emails inquiring about their coverage, one anonymous commenter made the connection:
You know who to blame for that don't you?
That's all for this week, folks!
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Not quite on point in my view in that the original copyright act, like its British counterpart, was for "the encouragement of learning". In more mundane terms, copyright is intended to facilitate the public dissemination of the expression contained in works of authorship. The sentence quoted above is a bit off to the extent it suggests that entry into the public domain is the key motivation.
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