Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the incumbent-panic dept

This week, the Association of American Publishers started complaining about Sci-Hub and tossing around stock concerns about "intellectual property". Mason Wheeler won first place for insightful by honing in on the difference between IP and copyright:

Intellectual property is not the point of copyright; it's the mechanism of copyright, the means it uses to accomplish its purpose, which is to encourage people to create useful things and bring them to the public domain.

When a mechanism starts doing things that run counter to its purpose, we declare it "broken" and either throw it out or take it to a specialist to repair it.

Meanwhile, we were expressing concerns about the rise of discussion around the supposed "value gap" in online music services, and TheResidentSkeptic won second place for insightful with a redefinition of the term:

The "Value Gap" they need to be concerned about is the one between what they value their content at and what consumers value it at.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, first we've got one more response to that post, this time from aerinai focusing on the specific ridiculousness of complaining about a choice in platforms:

What I don't understand is, if YouTube is not valuable to them, then they have the choice to not put their music on YouTube. ContentID gives them the freedom to restrict OTHERS from doing the same with their content... So how can you yell "This service is not making me enough money! Its not even worth it to have our content on here!" and yet simultaneously still keep your music on it.... If they want better terms, start their own site and pay others what they think is an appropriate rate... but that takes work, so nahhhhh.....

And yet another industry was getting mad this week — the newspaper industry was complaining about John Oliver's failure to solve all their problems. That Anonymous Coward experienced some deja vu:

Gee an out of touch industry that ignored things were changing, and expect others to fix their problems... Where have I seen this before??

Over on the funny side, the first place comment comes in response to the EFF's call for a truth-in-labelling law for products with DRM. The idea has some merit, however Inwoods couldn't help but be immediately suspicious of one of the examples offered in justification:

"Adam J installed Microsoft’s Groove"

Bullshit. No one in the history of the internet has ever done that.

In second place, we've got another response to the fight between newspapers and John Oliver, this time from an anonymous commenter who joined the many people confused by Tribune's recent rebranding:

tronc? Isn't that what you give to a dead horse so it doesn't feel anything when you flog it?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with one final response to that post from an anonymous commenter who saw the whole thing as something of a death rattle:

You know when an industry is in trouble when they want comedians to give them business strategies.

Finally, we head to the amazingly-not-over fight about the infamous monkey selfie. After a primatologist defended the the supposed copyright on the grounds that Macaques are super smart, Gumnos wondered if turnabout was fair play:

Does the opposite apply?

“Your honor, these representatives for {PETA,big media} are really, really dumb, so we move to declare their copyrights as void…”

That's all for this week, folks!

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