Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the chitter-chatter dept

We've got another double winner this time around, and it comes in response to recent sad news: the death of David Bowie. As we examined some of the copyright questions surrounding his work, one anonymous commenter achieved first place for both insightful and funny with a simple comment:

The saddest thing is that Bowie only has an incentive to write new music for 70 more years.

Meanwhile, after we summed up the year's box office take as "holy shit, look at all the money", Violynne won second place for insightful by building on that thought:

Uh... something's amiss here. Let me grab out my pencil so I can fix it.

"holy shit, look at all the money, for which our accounting firms will make quick work to ensure not a single, fucking penny will be moved to the profits column."

Better.

As for the rest of the article, meh. New year. Same rhetoric. Nothing changes. Moving on.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll start out with one more comment that received both an insightful and a funny badge, though the voting on the funny side wasn't enough to bring it into the leaderboard. After the White House asked a two part question — (a) how to stop ISIS from using the internet to radicalize, and (b) how to undercut ISIS with content published by others — TechDescartes noticed a bit of a contradiction:

To accomplish (a), eliminate the First Amendment. To accomplish (b), rely on the First Amendment.

Next, we've got a response from Not An Electric Rodent to the idea that games may be on their way to being uncrackable:

Inevitably, if it it's uncrackable, it's also going to do hideous things to your computer so I for one won't be buying it or anything like it. I like my computer to be useful, thanks.

Over on the funny side, we've already had out first place winner above, so we move straight on to second place — and a comment that also rose to third place on the insightful side. In discussing the nonsense assertion that the internet has destroyed good music, we noted John Philip Sousa's famous fear that the phonograph would be the end of kids out singing on the street. TheResidentSkeptic saw some truth in this:

Sousa was correct...

..but not for his reasons.

Today if a group of kids was outside singing a song, they would be immediately sued by 3 performance rights agencies, 2 collection services, and the lawyer for the band whose music they had the audacity to sing.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start with an anonymous response to Mike Huckabee's invocation of god and religion in a copyright lawsuit:

I'm pretty sure Mike Huckabee invokes religion in deciding what sort of pizza to order.

Finally, we return to the White House's two-part question about ISIS online, where Berenerd had a suggestion for dealing with question (a):

Sign them up for Comcast as their ISP...

That's all for this week, folks!

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