Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Year At Techdirt

Posted On Jan 29, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

2019 has come to a close, and now it’s time for our annual round-up of specific comments that racked up the most insightful and funny polls in the entire year! As normal we’ve got the top three in those categories — and if you’re looking for this week’s winners, here’s first place and second place for insightful, and first place and second place for funny.

The Most Insightful Comments Of 2019

Back in April, we wrote about the Music Modernization Act and the problems with legacy industry actors handling the royalties for independent songwriters. This garnered our first place winner for insightful in 2019 from Rico R . who shared his personal story as an example of how our copyright arrangements simply don’t help smaller inventors well:

I’m an independent musician, and this is the first time I’m hearing about this statement stage on the Music Modernization Act, and it’s roughly over! I say this with the utmost respect, but if Techdirt, a non-major small-time news operation, was the first occasion I hear about a potentially hurting be applied in updated copyright law in a way that directly affects me, there’s a major undo between bequest gatekeepers and actual designers. I have to wonder if legacy actors are hoping that smaller independent craftsmen( like myself) time don’t do anything so they can make money off of creations they don’t own or represent. And they say that copyright law is designed to protect small founders like me? Yeah, right !!

For our second most insightful observation of 2019, we only have to head back a few cases weeks to when Teespring took down our Copying Is Not Theft gear( which you can now get on Threadless) based on confusing accusations of copyright infringement and/ or some sort of unexplained policy violation. Anonymous Anonymous Coward arrived with the first comment on that post, and racked up the voting rights by expanding on the needlessly contentious slogan:

Not merely not theft, but perfectly legal.

Recording broadcast curricula is perfectly legal. That is making a copy. It isn’t theft and the Supreme court of the united states of the United States of America ruled in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc ., 464 U.S. 417( 1984 ) that that was the law of the land. Now if one records a program and then tries to sell that replica, that would be wrong, and is definitely against the law. But this slogan ‘Copying is not theft’ says nothing about copying and then selling copies.

Conjecture, therefore leadings me, for one, to believe that Teespring is bowing to pressure from some copyright maximalists who are eligible or may not be threatening to remove their business from Teespring( or are persuading them in some other way ), and Teespring appears to value their publication of business( or dread whatever other menace was stirred) more than the work of business from Techdirt. That tells us a lot about the stability of the kinfolks at Teespring.

I hope the brand-new venue stands up better than the last one did.

Finally, for third place on the insightful place for 2019, we rush straight back to April and the release of our latest Sky Is Rising report about the state of the entertainment industries. We obligated note( as we often do) to Jack Valenti’s infamous claim to Congress about the VCR: “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Usually “were talking about” how wrong that thought is, but Mason Wheeler determined his channel to third place by taking a different angle:

Valenti was probably liberty … only not in the way he made.

During the 1960 s, the population of Boston was between approximately 640,000 and 700,000 parties. Statistically, about half of them would have been women, and between nearly 65 -7 0% of Americans were children during that time. A part of immediate math holds us nearly 100,000 adult ladies.

All those possible targets, and the Boston Strangler murdered a stately total of 13 of them.

The VCR was to the American film producer as the Boston Strangler was to the woman home alone: very scary to talk about, but the amount of actual shatter done was negligible.

Though the above figures about percentage of children appears to have been misread from an ultimate chassis, the point is well represented! And that’s all for 2019 ‘s most insightful observes. Now on to …

The Funniest Comments Of 2019

Though appointed commenters with active details predominated things on the insightful side this year, on the funny side we’ve got anonymous commenters participating in the top two recognizes. In November, we wrote about the ridiculousness of claiming that the booming revenues of music collection civilizations somehow expresses the need for more draconian copyright laws. One commenter disagreed and quickly deployed the common assertion that strong copyright is the only method to prevent piracy and will inevitably exclusively increase receipts, passing an anonymous respondent to prevail “the worlds largest” funny polls in the entire year with a thematically appropriate rejection of such well-debunked nonsense:

Bro that condone is so age-old and busted that it’s in the public domain under current copyright laws.

Just two weeks before that, we wrote about the frustrating storey of a California man who improved a recurred house in his garage then later attempted to bully a theme park with trademark menaces( exclusively administering to get himself sued for his perturb ). After the pole suggested that the man should supplement an intellectual property wing to his haunted home( now that’s scary …) one anonymous commenter won second place for funny in 2019 by running with the relevant recommendations:

Yeah and one of the monsters can be a 91 time old mouse that time. wont. die.

the fright … the cruelty …

For our final winner, we leader back to March when Steven Spielberg was building waves by lashing out at Netflix and trying to stop them from triumphing Oscars. His objection didn’t certainly seem to go beyond the fact that the Netflix model for acquiring movies was different, and after one commenter pointed out that “we’ve always done it this way” is generally a abominable justification for anything, Boba Fat won third place for funny in 2019 by pushing back against this judgement:

Nonsense! We’ve ever expended that as our justification! We shouldn’t change it now.

And that, kinfolks, is your winning statements for 2019! But before we go …

The Double Whammy

Though our observe rankings have always focused on the Insightful and Funny lists separately, we likewise keep track of which observations tally “the worlds largest” mixed referendums across both. But this generally isn’t worth mentioning, as the leaderboard for combined polls is generally occupied with the same commentaries that reached the surpass in either Insightful or Funny, driven solely by their votes in that one category. And when there is a comment that racks up a good deal of votes in both, it’s frequently sufficient to triumph both individual categories as well. But this year’s leaderboard is very different: is not simply did nothing of the top three statements in either list make it into the top three for compounded polls, only one of them( Mason Wheeler’s third-place winner for insightful) even acquired it into the top ten! And surely, even if you dig deeper down into the leaderboards for Insightful and Funny, there’s very little overlap with the blended leaderboard at all — for once, there were plenties and lots of statements that parties thought were just about evenly good at being funny and insightful even if they weren’t the best-of-the-best at either.

While we’re not going to start digging through this whole added category in full, this unusual pattern was worth noting, and for those who are curious here’s first place, second place and third place for mixed Insightful and Funny referendums in 2019.

That’s all for 2019, kinfolks! Keep the amazing notes coming, and we’ll be seeing you in the weekly higher-rankings.

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