Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes in response to Sean Spicer's about face on the Confide app, which prompted one anonymous commenter to point out a second layer of hypocrisy:

Oh the irony and hypocrisy when the team that screamed "her emails!" so much didn't learn to use official channels from the Clinton issue, but just learned to work harder at hiding their electronic use policy violations.

For second place, we head to our response to T Bone Burnett's video submission to the Copyright Office, were That One Guy had some additional thoughts:

Ignoring for a moment the fact that more is being created than ever before, including music, which rather nicely undercuts the whole 'scorched earth of creativity' thing he seems to have going, reading this I can't help but wonder about his stance towards the 'creative wonderland' that was the major labels before the internet came along and yanked the rug out from under them by offering creators a way to have their music heard and purchased without going through them.

Because I don't know about anyone else, but 'handful of mega corporations ... living fat off the artistic, cultural, and economic value everyone else creates online' sounds like a dead ringer for the labels who demanded that if anyone wanted to be heard they went through them, paying and paying dearly for the privilege and leaving anyone they didn't grace with their benevolence in the dust.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll start out with one more response to that video, this time from hij:

This guy cut his teeth in a traveling revue playing on the road. He moved from playing small events to big time concerts. All of the issues he brought up have nothing to do with the internet. You can replace "internet" with any other venue. The problems he brings up are exactly the same whether or not it is a bunch of local bands playing down on the corner bar, big name productions at a nearby city's stadium, or some nebulous internet people.

Then he explicitly says the problem is not technology it is the business models. If that is the case change the business model. The world does not owe him a chance to play in his studio. The world wants to see him on stage playing. It is not up to the government to provide a way for him to create a monopoly and force people to listen and pay for his music the way he wants it. It is a two way street, and he needs to listen to his fans. Both the fans and the artists need to adapt. Rigidly clinging to a way for him to control his fans will only result in him watching them walk away regardless of the technology.

As for his disdain for the mega corporations getting fat off the backs of the poor artists, he is right that it is a problem. Trying to go back to a time where it was his buddies in the recording industry who were taking advantage of the artists is just a quest to go backwards to a time that is not so different than the present dystopia he insists we are living in. (We are not.)

As for bemoaning the idea that the internet is turning into a corporate playground designed to take people's money away.... Sorry, but that happened 20 years ago. That train left the station a long long time ago. When T-bone Rip Van Winkle wakes up and realizes that it is 2017 he is going to be surprised.

Next, we've got some thoughts from Roger Strong on the idea that Trump's behavior is no different from previous presidents:

This is how you normalize corruption and incompetence. Declare that "everyone else does it."

Sure, you could declare Obama to be the same as the previous administration. There'd be some truth there, as he kept most of the same policies and didn't prosecute those who turned the country into a torture state. On the other hand he do anything on the scale of the lies and deception used to drag the country into a decade+ long war.

But declaring Trump to be in the same league? Take Obama's worst lie and put it into a Trump speech. It would go entirely unnoticed, overshadowed by far worse Trump claims.

Over on the funny side, first place goes to an anonymous commenter who made the most obvious and appropriate joke when we had some HTML issues in a post about "fake news":

fake formatting.

For second place, we head to our post about the leak of a State Dept. memo on the subject of stopping leaks, where one commenter objected by pitching a bunch of strange hypothetical alternative scenarios. Thad offered a delightfully deconstructivist response:

You make a good point. If this thing was a different thing, would it be the same thing?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got one more nod to Thad since he was on a roll shutting down silly criticisms this week and because it gives me a chance to shamelessly remind you about the Techdirt Gear store on Teespring. After one commenter objected that our Takedown tee doesn't include explicit recognition that some takedowns are valid, he hit back:

Other facts which are omitted from the T-shirts:

Murder is illegal.
Puppies are adorable.
Water is composed of two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen.
Neo Nadi won five gold medals for fencing in the 1920 Olympics.
Batman was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger.
Val Kilmer's first film credit is the 1984 film Top Secret!
You're an idiot.

This is an exhaustive list. There are no other facts besides the ones I have just listed.

Finally, we head to our post about IBM's terrible patent on out-of-office email responders, where TechDescartes neatly wrapped everything up in a bow:

Is it just me?

Or does it seem like Patent Examiners have set their out-of-office replies to "Patent Granted"?

That's all for this week, folks!