Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the rebuking-the-stupid dept

The anti-net-neutrality crowd was out in full force this week, bringing us both of our most insightful comments. First, after Verizon said that regulating the internet for the first time is "unnecessary and counterproductive", DannyB offered his curiously unsigned thoughts on the matter:

Heavily regulating the Internet for the first time would be unnecessary if you were doing your job.

Your Job: to route packets closer to their destination.

Not Your Job: inspecting them, 'prioritizing' them, mis-routing them, playing games with DNS, being the copyright cops for a private industry that has it's head so far . . . well, let's just say it's not your job to do anything but route packets.

As for your lawsuit. Boo Hoo. You brought all of this on yourself.

Sincerely,

Next, after an astroturfing group made a attempt to discredit net neutrality with media campaigns ranging from the stupid to the bizarre (including a porno parody video), John Fenderson decided that in that case, hey, fair's fair:

As long as they're going to make stupid, wrong arguments
We can reply with our own stupid, wrong argument: if these nefarious, greedy companies hate the idea this much, then it must be a great idea.

Of course, net neutrality wasn't the only issue being grossly misrepresented this week. We also saw the MPAA once again insisting that films and TV shows are easily available to buy or rent online, and as such the only motivation for piracy must be a refusal to pay. Unsurprisingly, this claim was quickly debunked, leading to our first editor's choice comment for insightful in which an anonymous commenter reiterates just how stupid the idea of format release windows are to begin with:

Not even like books and music...

The movie industry pretends that they can limit how and when you see their creative works when they're first released to the public - through a movie theater...

When a musician produces a new album or song, does he force you to see it live in concert before you can buy it and listen to it yourself?

When an author releases a new book, do they force you to come listen to someone read it to you (or watch the words roll by on a screen that they control) before you can obtain it and read it at your own pace?

This idea that they can control your "viewing experience" is rather bullshit IMO. I don't want to go to a movie theater - I want to obtain a copy of the movie that I can watch at my leisure, pausing and playing as needed, rewinding and watching again to see the parts I didn't understand or wasn't paying attention to, while eating my own food on my own couch in front of my own TV (or sitting on a plane during a business trip).

The idea that I must wait weeks or months for this opportunity is strange and old-fashioned... and by the time the movie is released on disc (or streaming), it's already lost a lot of it's luster and interest. They're excluding a huge audience here.

Next, we've got a comment from jameshogg in response to the latest developments in the copyright lawsuit over Blurred Lines and its Marvin Gaye influences, in which he elegantly explains just how quickly the supposed idea-expression dichotomy, or at least the way it's currently handled, falls apart under scrutiny:

"Copyright doesn't protect the notes, it protects the symphonies!"

A word is a symphony of letters.
A sentence is a symphony of words.

A line is a symphony of dots.
A square is a symphony of lines.
A cube is a symphony of squares.

A blended colour is a symphony of primary colours.

Only when you point these things out do you then hear the cries of "well we're still going to just set the limits here, here and here anyway because we JUST ARE" when their logic of "symphonies, not notes" falls apart, sometimes it's "but those things you mentioned are too foundational to meet the limits" one time and "three black circles DOES count for Disney!!" another: they fall back onto "we decide" as the basis of their argument, which is way too slippery a standard to pass any elementary freedom of expression test.

When you cut through all the jargon and crap, copyright believers make the same claim as all censors: they consider themselves capable of drawing lines without falling into corruption.

Over on the funny side, truly the funniest comment of the week isn't from Techdirt at all — it's from the Bob Litt, the top intelligence community lawyer who endorsed magical security backdoors while stating "I’m not a cryptographer, but I am an optimist". As for our comments, first place for funny comes in anonymously from someone who saw a better choice of phrasing:

Damn it, Jim! I'm an optimist, not a cryptographer!

In second place for funny, we've got a response to the big net neutrality news of the week: Tom Wheeler officially throwing his support behind Title II. Unsurprisingly, a member of the "I automatically hate anything with the word 'regulation' in it" crowd mocked the idea in our comments, leading Baron von Robber to follow the train of thought:

Yea, you dummies! Just look at other countries that have regulated the Internet as a utilities. They have multiple ISPs to choose from, higher speeds and lower prices in their regulated states!

Suckers!


Wait a tick........

For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got a theme of food, because why not? First, after the French government made some much-derided warnings about the dangers of people who stop eating baguettes and thus might be terrorists, one anonymous commenter took it as proof of a pet theory:

Atkin's Diet = Terrorism. I always suspected that.

Finally, after one commenter went on a bit of an overboard rant about the trials of ordering pizza online (something I personally love and do far too often), and pined for the good ol' days of a simple direct phone call (which are also the good now days, since independent pizza places aren't exactly extinct), jupiterkansas took the theme one gloriously absurd step further:

I remember when you had to walk to the pizza place to get a pizza because there were no telephones. Of course, they didn't have pizza then either, so you just came home with a rutabaga. And you liked it.

That's all for this week, folks!

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