Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place comment on the insightful side came in response to our post about the fact that copyright maximalists appear to have thrown in the towel on fighting for more copyright extensions. John Snape offered a simple and popular sentiment:

If you can’t make a profit after 28 years exploiting a copyright, you’re a failure.

In second place, we have an anonymous comment that also racked up quite a few funny votes, responding to Trump’s latest comments about libel laws:

I don’t think I’m ever going to get over the guy who says whatever it is that pops into his head complaining that you should not be allowed to say whatever it is that pops into your head.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Ninja in response to the NSA denying prior knowledge of the Meltdown and Spectre exploits, noting that this is a little hard to simply believe without questioning:

Fox denies knowledge of huge hole in the fence. Claims it would never harm chickens.

I’ve actually truncated Ninja’s comment there, because he went on to quote an earlier comment from discordian_eris regarding the FBI and the MalwareTech case, and so rather than include it second-hand, here it is as our second editor’s choice for insightful:

I’m reminded of this quote almost every time the FBI is involved in a case.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truth without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Thomas Jefferson

The FBI lies so habitually I fail to see how any judge can treat them as credible.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is another comment about the FBI, this time from an anonymous commenter responding to their latest cries about encryption being a threat to public safety:

News Flash: “FBI Says Whispering is Evil and Everyone must speak loudly into the microphone”

In second place, it’s back to the story about copyright extensions, where regular parodist Mr Big Content bemoaned the sad state of affairs:

This Is What Happens When You Let Teh Pirates Make Copywright Laws

It should be a Law that anybody who has ever copied ANYTHING should be probihibited from having any say in Coppyright Laws. Then we will SEE FAIRNESS PREVAIL for teh TRUE INTELECTUAL PROPETRY OWNERS. YOU KNOW ITS MORALLLY RIGHT!!!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with JoeCool offering another analogous take on the FBI’s encryption panic:

Then the FBI lambasted the glove industry for enabling criminals to commit crimes without leaving fingerprints. The evil geniuses of the glove cartel are making the jobs of police everywhere much more difficult, and should be forced to work on gloves that leave fingerprints when used to commit crimes.

/s

And finally, we head to our post about how a satirical false excerpt from Fire and Fury demonstrated the futility of trying to ban “fake news”, where Roger Strong grasped at some threads of hope:

Some of us are holding onto hope that Trump is actually a still-alive Andy Kaufman is his greatest satire yet.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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