Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the winning-streak dept

That One Guy is back again, this time with both the first and second place wins on the insightful side. First up, it's his response to Sony Music's takedown of a lecture on music copyright:

99.9% accuracy... .01% of the time

This also serves to highlight even more the utterly absurd claims by maximalists that excessive and stringent 'copyright protections' aren't a problem for non-pirates because mistakes are so very rare. If something that is clearly an example of fair use can be pulled then pretty much anything can be, on nothing more than a blind assertion, 'That's infringing' without a single care to actually check if it is first.

Those that object to their actions and methods don't do so because they're siding with the pirates, as the maximalists like to claim, but because the maximalists have shown time and time again that they have no interest in avoiding collateral damage. If protecting 'legitimate' speech requires 'protecting pirates', as is the case, then the maximalists have only their complete indifference to accuracy to blame.

In second place, it's his thoughts on the irony of CBS failing at streaming the Grammy's while vilifying Spotify:

You first

As one of the linked articles show, the biggest reason streaming services 'don't pay artists enough' is because the labels take a huge cut, leaving the artists a tiny portion (45.6% to labels, 6.8% to artists in the study, a study paid for by the recording industry mind). There's also the fact that anyone that expects a single listen to pay even remotely as much as a permanent purchase is a greedy idiot of the highest order, but we'll ignore that for the moment.

If the labels are really going to whine about how streaming services just don't pay artists enough, then they're more than welcome to hand over some of their share, but given their complaints have absolutely nothing to do with how much the artists are getting, and everything to do with how much the labels are getting, I don't imagine they'd be very eager to start doing that.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out by looping back to the Sony takedown story, where one anonymous commenter suggested that the professor should have known his lecture would trigger a ContentID alert, and another pointed out how entirely irrelevant that is:

So what you are saying is that people cannot make use of fair use rights, because contentid cannot deal with it.

Next, after we discovered that a quiet "legal scrub" of the TPP had actually resulted in huge changes, another anonymous commenter nicely expressed the sort of suspicion this provokes:

The conspiracy enthusiast in me wonders about a "midnight revision" ala Mitch Glazier.

The paranoid conspiracy enthusiast in me wonders if the entire TPP was purposely written such that the meaning of several critical sections could be changed with the "cleanup" of single words.

Over on the funny side, we've got a pair of jokes that some might consider to be in poor taste, but more around here clearly consider to be hilarious. You've been warned. In first place, after Apple was ordered to help the FBI get into the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, TechDescartes quickly assembled a joke on a classic template:

A magistrate judge, an Apple employee, and an FBI agent agree to meet at a local bar. Only the Apple employee makes it. Why? Because the bar didn't have a back door.

In second place, after Karl asked of AT&T's failure to upgrade its networks following its purchase of DirecTV "are we feeling the amazing merger synergies yet?", Michael had a quick answer:

Yes we are. Some lube would be nice.

For editor's choice on the funny side, since we was tearing up the charts this week, we've got two more comments from TechDescartes. First, after John Brennan attempted to claim that encryption stopped the CIA from preventing the Paris attacks (despite a lot of evidence that most of the important communications were unencrypted), he suggested an explanation:

So the CIA cannot decrypt plaintext French?

Finally, in another response to the Grammy's digital failings, he laid it out nice and simple:

Can't
Be
Streamed

That's all for this week, folks!

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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Feb 2016 @ 1:56pm

    I've already took the IP extremist argument to its logical conclusion by stating that if false takedowns are so rare the IP extremists should have no problems with providing artists with the same or greater protections than IP holding distributors and allowing for them to receive the same or greater compensation from someone responsible for sending a false takedown request as one could receive from infringement and providing artists with the same penalty of perjury protections against a false takedown. After all if these false takedown requests are so rare then what difference does it make? If those making requests are so sure that their requests are legitimate then they should have nothing to fear (as the IP extremist would argue that if someone who is so sure that their content doesn't infringe then they have nothing to fear with regards to the possibility of facing a false takedown or the possibility of facing potentially huge infringement fines).

    IP extremists have never even made any effort to address the logical conclusion of their claims. They just cover their ears, close their eyes, and repeat the same nonsense as though these criticisms don't exist.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 22 Feb 2016 @ 1:45am

    Every week there are videos taken down on youtube
    some of which may be fair use ,
    if the video contains snippets of music from films or video games ,
    even though the video may be a review or commentary
    which would be fair use under us law .
    Theres no program which can detect whether a video is
    infinging or fair use unless the video is just a complete upload of a film or music video or song .

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Michael, 22 Feb 2016 @ 4:38am

      Re:

      unless the video is just a complete upload of a film or music video or song

      Which may, in fact, be fair use in some cases.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    webperts (profile), 22 Feb 2016 @ 4:21am

    Web Design Dubai

    Interesting Article.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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