Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, we noticed that despite Hollywood's constant insistence that it should be easy to use technology to block infringement, they couldn't even manage to secure their own screener copies of movies. Our first place winner for insightful was an anonymous commenter who summed it up pretty simply:

You'd be amazed at what feels easy if you're not the guy doing it.

Meanwhile, it appears Univision wasted no time in going full-corporate with its new Gawker property, by deleting six stories from the site over legal threats. Nate won second place for insightful by hatching an evil plan:

So basically I could silence all Gawker sites simply by writing a bot which threatened a lawsuit over each and every post?

That's scary.

P.S. It occurs to me that I wouldn't even need to code a bot; I think I could pull this off using only IFTTT.

Relatedly, our first editor's choice on the insightful side goes to IP Lawyer for pointing out something important about Gizmodo's bizarre attempt to declare cord-cutting over:

Gizmodo, now owned by television giant Univision.

Next, we've got a harsh-but-true anonymous response to the campaign to get the president to pardon Snowden:

If Snowden was a bankster, a torturer or a war criminal then he might have a chance. Obama hunts down whistleblowers. He doesn't pardon them.

Over on the funny side, we start out on our post about the latest DMCA takedown misfire, which this time saw Paramount shutting down a totally legitimate Ubuntu torrent as part of a bunch of takedowns for Transformers: Age of Extinction. Another anonymous commenter won first place for funny by musing on a possible explanation:

Maybe there's a lesser known Transformer by the name of "Ubuntu" that's made from open source car materials?

In second place, we've got Dheneb expanding on the notion that mandating encryption backdoors is like mandating holes in body armor:

That's OK. All you have to do is label those holes on the outside with something like "HOLE FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT USE ONLY" so that the bad guys will know not to aim there.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a response from Roger Strong to John McCain's shaming of Twitter at a Senate cybersecurity hearing:

Old Man Yells At Cloud (Services)

And finally, after a commenter suggested that lawyers should be outlawed, TechDescartes served up a classic rejoinder:

Yes, but then only outlaws will have lawyers.

That's all for this week, folks!