Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the heard-it-through-the-grapevine dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a short and simple response to the EU's approval of Article 13:

I can’t wait to see how many websites start geoblocking the EU.

In second place, we've got Anonymous Grande and Cox with another reaction:

Five votes, huh. This whole fight failed at five votes.

A'ight. What needs to be done next is not to vote for any of the MEPs who brought this thing into sight. Also, any corporations that lobbied for them must suffer from a mass boycott. No exceptions. No "but this movie is great," or "everyone's playing this game." Please, do not reward them for passing both Articles. Continuing to vote for or buy from them will just end up mudding our message.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got two more responses to the Article 13 vote. First, it's PaulT noting that concerns about geoblocking are not unrealistic:

That's not fearmongering at all, actually. There's still US-based sites I'm told I'm not allowed to go to because the site is still unclear on how to comply with GDPR, so they just block European IPs. It's bound to happen with other sites in reaction to this, even if they likely don't have to.

Next, it's That One Guy noting that there's only one way to block all infringing content:

There is actually a way for their idea to be true, but it's not a pretty one, and would gut the very sites they are talking about while creating gatekeepers with more power than ever.

The only way to make sure that only licenced content was posted would be to prohibit any content not licensed, such that if someone wanted to post to the likes of YT they would first need to sign with a licensing group(or a label/studio...), and then have them upload it(you know, when they got around to it).

Now I know what you're thinking, 'that sounds a lot like tv, where a handful of large companies get to decide what to show, and if you want your stuff to be shown then you have to go through them', and the reason for that is... it's pretty much exactly what it would be like. The label/studio/publisher gatekeepers of before would not only be back on their thrones, they'd have more power than ever before, and if you think a shift back to the gatekeeper model would be beneficial to the smaller creators that flourish under the current system... well, all I can say is treasure that naive innocence, you won't have it for long.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner comes in response to last week's comments post and specifically to a comment it highlighted about pencil manufacturers having to stop people from writing libelous content. Ryuugami took the joke a step further:

You mean pencil manufacturers can't monitor all content written with their tools? Sure they can. They just need to try harder. If it means each of their customers needs a company employee to constantly watch them, so be it; that's the price the pencil manufacturers need to pay to make sure their business doesn't screw any Real Artists(tm).

In second place, we've got an anonymous response to a commenter who apparently pasted a long rant about Article 13 full of accusations into our comments, but forgot to replace certain key numbers and thus accused Techdirt of having considerable influence over 1.8-billion people:

Mike why are you more popular than The king of pop ever was?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous response to the utterly baseless assertion that EU lawmakers must be both stupid and corrupt:

To be fair, not all of them are both stupid and corrupt.

There are some who are specialists in each.

And last but not least, we've got Toom1275 with another response to last week's comment about removing libelous pencil content — one which technically undermines the point of the analogy, but is nevertheless funny:

Actually, most pencils made nowadays come with an integrated component designed to do exactly that.

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