Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the things-were-said dept

It's been a while since we had a double-winner, but this week we've got one comment taking the first place spot for both funny and insightful. In response to our post about copyright being used to prevent an actress from showing her own demo reel, Killercool pointed out what a sad picture that paints of the rightsholder:

I hate to tell you...

If a clip, or even several clips, from your movie is equivalent to seeing your movie, then your movie is bad and you should feel bad.

In second place on the insightful side, we've got a comment from Thad artfully responding to the all-too-common and often extremely vague debates between capitalism and socialism:

I feel like debating between capitalism and socialism is like debating whether to use a hammer or a screwdriver: well, it depends, doesn't it? They're different tools, suited to different jobs.

I think it's less about "meeting in the middle" than using the right tool for the job. In some cases, that's capitalism; in some, it's socialism; in some, it's some combination of both; and in some, it's neither.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got a pair of responses to the recording industry's latest attempt to expand copyright. John Roddy suggested their efforts could be better spent elsewhere:

You know, if the industry would just put the exact same amount of effort into reworking their distribution model that they put into coming up with these hideously forced acronym bill titles, the entire problem would probably start to fix itself.

And Stephen T. Stone pointed out an often-forgotten reality:

Reminder: Copyright incentivizes distribution, not creation.

Over on the funny side, we've already had our first place comment, but in second place we've got a great theory from wshuff about how Chicago managed to win the most corrupt city award:

My friend from Chicago is pretty sure the city bought the votes needed to win the award.

For editor's choice, we've got one more comment from John Roddy, this time clarifying our post about the recent deluge of GDPR-driven privacy policy notifications:

To be "fair", the vast majority of the emails I've received so far weren't because of GDPR. It was just the companies feeling that privacy protections are good for everyone, so they wanted to extend that to everyone, not just EU residents. It's just an overabundance of kindness! The fact that roughly 100% of all of them say it the exact same way and conveniently happen to be right before the enactment of those rules is just a coincidence.

Finally, we've got an anonymous commenter's defense of the FBI's wildly inflated statistics on the number of locked devices:

Well, Steve Jobs himself did describe the original iPhone as a a "widescreen iPod with touch controls" a "revolutionary mobile phone" and a "breakthrough Internet communicator" so really the FBI is just counting each physical device as 3 different devices like Apple said they should.

That's all for this week, folks!

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team