Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the api,-dmca-and-other-acronyms dept

This week, there was lots of discussion about the Oracle/Google fight over the Java API, and from there we get our first place winner for insightful. Phaedrus (whose underlying username, I notice, is an excellent Discworld reference) wondered about the details of the fallout from all this API copyright nonsense:

If Oracle wins case, can IBM sue Oracle for using SQL ?

Implications seem endless ...

IANAL or a Computer Scientist.

But I think Oracle is poisoning a lot of wells here, and it would be nice if one of them was their own.

Next, we head to the disturbing story of a police officer being jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt his devices when asked, where DigDug got understandably angry about this apparent violation of a very basic right:

5th Ammendment violation, plain and simple.

I don't give a flying fuck what that Judge thinks, the 5th ammendment covers this 100%.

Any judge that disagrees with that should be pulled from the bench by their short-hairs and hung from their ankles until they see reason.

Their punishment will be purely of their own making, all they have to do to be done with it is to enforce the Constitution they swore to uphold.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got two comments that came in response to our roundup of all the bad ideas raised at the Copyright Office's DMCA roundtable. After one commenter noted that the entertainment industries seem hellbent on destroying the internet, John Fenderson noted that their goal is more nuanced, but no better, than that:

Their goal from day 1 has been very clear, and has never wavered. They correctly view the internet as a threat to their collective control over media distribution.

They don't want to destroy the internet as infrastructure. They want to control the use of the internet as a means of media distribution. They don't really care about how they make that happen or what the fallout would be, so long as it happens.

Meanwhile, an anonymous commenter noted that it is indeed true, in a way, that most movies "don't make much money":

Any movie that makes a profit clearly hired the wrong accountant. Just look how much gross revenue the original Star Wars trilogy has brought in and it still is not profitable.

Over on the funny side, we start out on what is undoubtedly the funniest story of the week: the congressional candidate who shared a screenshot that included some overlooked porn tabs open in his browser. David won first place for funny by identifying the real sin:

Porn's okay, I don't mind. But Yahoo? That's where I draw the line.

In second place, we've got a comment from NoahVail, which probes the limits of a particular UK superinjunction:

i thought it was odd that thE streisand effect wasn't in pLay here, especially since The gag can ONly be applied to JOurnalists in tHe uk Newspapers.

then i read who the celebs where and i understood why everyone outside the uk is freaked out about mentioning names.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous response to Louisiana's attempt to require age verification for "adult" content online, pointing out just how pointless this would be anyway:

The only thing age verification filters accomplish is teaching children how to subtract 18 or 21 from the current year.

Finally, we've got a comment from our post announcing our new "Nerd Harder." t-shirt (which you should consider picking up if you haven't already). After one commenter requested a version without the trailing period, Pixelation had an amusingly apt response:

You can figure out how to remove it. NERD HARDER!

That's all for this week, folks!

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