Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the said-and-done dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a summary of the situation with sites clamping down on sexual content, largely out of fear of FOSTA liability:
Ah, yes, America: a country where you can show someone’s head being sliced in half with a giant axe without people thinking twice about it, but you can barely show a glimpse of a woman’s bare breast in any context without “think of the children”-type calls for censorship.
Christ, this country is repressed.
In second place, it's an anonymous commenter with another point about that situation, specifically Amazon's questionable takedown practice:
The problem I have is with them keeping any earned money when they terminate the account. That money should be paid.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment about sexual content takedowns, with Thad clarifying why this is different from the usual private platform situation when it comes to "censorship":
I think the pertinent question here is, are these companies choosing not to associate with people saying these things because they're worried about legal liability? Because if that's the case, then there's a pretty good argument that this is a government restriction on speech, not a private one.
Next, we've got PaulT with a reaction to learning that some Australian senators signed their problematic new social media/violent content bill without even reading it:
Sigh... I can understand emotional overreacting, but even the dumbest political should be made to read the things they try to make the rest of us obey before they sign it into law. Any law that's passed should be null and void the moment the people with the job of reading it admit that they failed to do their job.
If I ran to sign contracts at work without reading the T&Cs because I had an emotional reaction to something, I'd at least be disciplined if that came out, if not fired. Even if the end result turned out to be what I assumed it would be, but especially if there were things in there that would needless cripple the work of colleagues. Why not these people?
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Rocky with a response to another commenter's quip that EU lawmakers — having slipped and admitted that Article 13 will force sites to have upload filters — might wake up to a horse head in the bed:
And then Paramount will sue them for infringement because they "pirated" a scene from The Godfather...
In second place, we've got Bamboo Harvester arguing that a ridiculous report about the cost of photo piracy was just the tip of the iceberg:
You're just not...
...doing the math right.
Each view is a theft.
Average person blinks 1,000 times a minute, so that's 1,000 views per minute stolen.
Except... Most people have TWO eyes, so the number of views is doubled.
By their numbers, that's 640,000 Euros per minute per person viewing any given image....
(Though in truth I don't think the average person does, in fact, blink seventeen times per second.)
For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got a comment from ArkieGuy about the same report, wondering if our commentary on some of its content was bolstering its message:
So, does TechDirt have a license for that fancy chart? If not, today's number just went up by €532.5! /s
Next, we've got Get off my cyber-lawn! hitting the report's inflated numbers with a classic callback:
The author must have studied economics at Prenda U!
That's all for this week, folks!
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My vote goes to ...
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My vote goes to ...
The TL;DR party candidate.
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Ha!
I want to see any workplace where you'd not rather get reprimanded when asked to install/update Windows on some computer for saying "I'll need three work days for going through the EULA terms and the privacy statement."
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Re: Ha!
You... have no idea how companies work :/
At many (most?) companies you are simply not allowed to install anything by yourself. If you want to install something, you will go to your IT department. If they deem your request worthy, they'll ask the legal department. The legal department will then read the EULA, and several weeks later they may allow the IT department to install the software for you.
Updates are also not done piecemeal as employees see fit to do them; that's both a security and a legal nightmare. The IT department is responsible for updating software. You know, the "sysadmin" position.
So yes, you will be reprimanded. But not for saying that you need to read the EULA. You'll get reprimanded for trying to install stuff without permission.
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Re: Re: Ha!
Seconded. A real good way to get fired at my old job at a medium/large sized healthcare provider was to try to install ANYTHING by yourself. That or messing with anything in the control panel other than a new background picture and even that was frowned upon.
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Re: Technology
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Re: Bye Fake Passport!
To their credit, the bots are still more honest than blue, Hamilton, Bennett, and Jhon Herrick Smith...
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Regarding the second insightful editor's choice: I've long felt there should be a rule in the US government that any bill should be public for a minimum amount of time based on its length before it's voted on. That would effectively prohibit the thousand-page bills that tend to be all too common in Congress where only lobbyists know what's in them. It wouldn't ensure the people putting their names to a bill would have actually read them, but it would ensure someone did, or at least had the chance to.
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Re:
Obama made that a campaign promise, which lasted all of 10 seconds once he got into office and needed that Obamacare thing passed in the middle of the night under cover of darkness.
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Which the Supreme Court afterwards confirmed as being constitutional.
Why not do the US version of the NHS instead of leaving it up to profit-mongers to run your healthcare? The only reason why we run into trouble with the NHS is because of the government interfering instead of just funding it. Their failed efforts at privatisation cost more money than they make.
Healthcare should be treated as a necessity like the army and the police.
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First they need to get the costs of healthcare in this country under control. Then they can think about socializing it. But I'll be damned if I ever vote for anything that puts our tax dollars at the whim of pharmaceutical, medical equipment supply and even medical professionals' predatory pricing practices.
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"But I'll be damned if I ever vote for anything that puts our tax dollars at the whim of pharmaceutical, medical equipment supply and even medical professionals' predatory pricing practices."
It is already subject to that, and more. You already pay more in public money per capita than any other country, and system has been set up so that Medicare isn't even allowed to negotiate better pricing. Pricing is out of control because it's not socialised. You get less for more, because you people are so scared of "socialism" you won't allow your elected officials to reduce costs.
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"Intellectual property" rights should never be granted for medicine or medical appliances. It's the profit motive that's the problem. Get that out of the mix and watch prices plummet.
R& D should be publicly funded and advertising to the public for medicine banned.
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""Intellectual property" rights should never be granted for medicine or medical appliances."
I'm not sure about "never", but the endless tinkering to avoid the product being "generic" in the US needs to stop. People literally die because of that crap.
"It's the profit motive that's the problem"
Oh, no doubt but there's more to it than that. For example - one of the reasons why American healthcare costs are so high is because they're litigation happy. So, doctors oversubscribe medicines and tests to avoid malpractice lawsuits, which ramps the basic costs of healthcare, which in turn puts people off
That's oversimplified, but it is quite complicated (though most of the problems could be eased with that dreaded "socialism"). Most of us manage a mixture of public and private healthcare, of course.
"R& D should be publicly funded"
That's the thing - it quite often is publicly funded. Certainly the parts before they have identified a potentially viable end product are.
"advertising to the public for medicine banned"
That's always been one of the stranger things I've seen on TV when visiting the US - ads that would be banned everywhere else which essentially encourage people to tell a doctor what to prescribe for for them. No wonder there's so many issues.
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Yes, but only by creating some bizarre legal fiction where something can be both a tax and not a tax at the same time.
Nevertheless, that's irrelevant to the issue of Obama promising that proposed legislation would be published online for citizen review before being passed into law, then shit-canning that process the moment it became politically inconvenient for him.
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Agreed. Boondoggles are basically socialism for corporations.
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