Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the so-you-say dept

This week, our first place comment on the insightful side comes from our post about Elizabeth Warren cosponsoring a bill to repeal Section 230 — before it was revealed that her name was included in error, and the post was updated. One commenter defended the apparent move as a reasonable way to fight "big tech", and an anonymous commenter responded:

Except 230 reform isn't an effort against Big Tech in a practical sense despite how they see it. It will ultimately weaken the freedoms of individuals. "Big Tech" will be just fine regardless of how the laws get shaped. They can afford to adapt. But the individual doesn't have the budget or the voice at the table to make sure their interests are represented.

In second place, it's Norahc with a comment on our post about National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day:

I'll celebrate Law Enforcement Appreciation Day as soon as cops start treating citizens with respect the other 364 days of the year.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the financialization of music and the evolution of antipiracy messaging:

Remember the early 2000s when you could somehow still make the argument that downloading music hurt the artists, despite how label policies by and large were the ones responsible for how much moneys the artists actually got?

These days the antipiracy campaigns aren't even about the artists anymore; the most publicly extravagant ones already squandered considerable public sympathy. Instead you've got companies playing up the scare factor of malware infections and financially supporting human traffickers... somehow.

Financialization and screwing the actual content creators over has always been the objective since Day 1.

Next, we've got James Burkhardt on our post about Wordle clones, responding to someone with some erroneous ideas about game copyright:

Mechanics are literally one fo the few things you explicitly can't get copyright protection for. its in the law. look it up. 17 USC § 102 There is the text for you. its not long. Look at provision (b).

(b)In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

The script is copyrightable, the characters are copyrightable, the visuals are copyrightable, the music is copyrightable, voice dialog is copyrightable (all subject to other restrictions on copyrightability). The mechanics are not.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Norahc again, this time with a comment about Criss Angel's ridiculous legal threat over a parody:

Not even Criss Angel can make the Streisand Effect disappear.

In second place, it's Richard M with another comment on our National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day post:

WTF?

Reads headline
WTF What site am I on?

Starts to read article
Well that makes more sense

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with wshuff and another comment about Criss Angel:

Maybe he could hire David Blaine to maybe bury the website in a block of ice or something.

Finally, it's Bobvious with an excellent joke on our post about Meta suing a data scraping firm:

It's OK everyone.

They're only scraping Metadata.

That's all for this week, folks!