Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is jmcken with a comment about Benji Smith taking down his Prosecraft" tool, and specifically the frequent assertion that it matters where/how he got the books that formed its dataset:
Think of it this way: If someone pirates a movie, that's unlawful. But if that person then writes a review of that movie for their blog, that review is perfectly legal, regardless of how they obtained their copy of the movie.
Prosecraft was basically a fancy review" of books with extra bells and whistles. Even if he'd pirated the books, it would have no bearing on Prosecraft itself.
In second place, it's an anonymous comment about the notion that Salesforce should be liable for sex trafficking due to the services it provided to Backpage:
This is absolute nonsense. If you knew anything about how computer services are marketed, you would know that Salesforce senior executives were only tangentially in the loop. A Salesforce salesperson and a support team made this sale and, appropriately, stayed in touch with the customer to assess what additional features and functions would help their business. This is CRM software that's in use by thousands of businesses. I suspect the senior execs could rattle off the names of numerous Fortune 500 companies that are customers, but Backpage? Not likely.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment on that post, this time from Zonker exploring the implications of such liability:
If Salesforce can be held liable for sex-trafficking alleged to have committed by one of their customers unrelated to their services then eX-twitter, and Musk personally, is definitely liable for knowingly reinstating and supporting known CSAM accounts and refusing to take down the majority of reported material.
Next, it's an anonymous comment about Tomek Baginski, the producer of The Witcher TV series, blaming the show's poor viewership on dumb Americans and social media:
Baginski believes the base tenet of copyright maximalist publishers, and that is any failure to make massive profits is always somebody else's fault.
Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous comment responding to a question about whether it's rational to be paranoid about being spied on online, and whether that's because of Facebook:
We're pretty sure it isn't rational, and isn't a result of Facebook. Trust us on this. - NSA
In second place, it's Toom1275 with a comment about cops and dogs:
Dogs need to be armed with guns to defend themselves against dangerous cops.
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous comment about the complaints from the producer of The Witcher:
Back in my day, we didn't watch Youtube or Tiktok, we had Civilization and Railroad Tychoon which we would play for weeks and months on end. We had our long attention span, yes.
Of course, we weren't watching series on Netflix in those days either. ... because we were playing Civilization and Railroad Tycoon, and so on.
Finally, we've got an anonymous comment responding to the conclusion that humans being exposed to other humans won't automatically drive one crazy" with a silly but very classic type of joke:
counterpoint - Have you met my mother-in-law?
That's all for this week, folks!