Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MathFox with a comment about the troubles at Truth Social:

What ‘Truth Social’ shows is how easy it is easy to create an Internet platform. It also shows how hard it is to make an Internet platform successful.

In second place, it’s Thad with a comment about Clarence Thomas gunning to overturn NY Times v. Sullivan:

I wonder why Clarence Thomas would want to make it easier to sue people who say damaging things about public figures.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment on our post about Facebook moderating posts that mention abortion pills:

Well the comments on this are definitely going to be… interesting. So let’s just head off a few of the strawmen right now.

1. This article did not in any way say that Facebook is not allowed to do this or that they should face criminal or civil penalties for doing so.

2. At no point were Trump supporters posts auto-removed simply for posting the words “Trump” or “Conservative”

3. It is not hypocritical to disagree with a particular moderation decision while still supporting their right to moderate

OK, carry on.

Next, it’s That One Guy with a comment about the ongoing attacks on digital ownership and the library model:

‘If libraries were not already a well established part of society they never would have been allowed to be formed.’

Modern publishers: ‘Challenge accepted.’

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Beefcake with a comment about the USPTO granting Ohio State a trademark on the word “the”:

This article illustrates that nothing is as definite as it used to be.

In second place, it’s Naughty Autie responding to a post about Nintendo’s IP bullying that mentioned “using Nintendo as something of a virtual punching bag”:

Careful, Tim. That’s Nintendo’s too.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got two more comments from That One Guy. First, it’s a response to Google giving in to GOP political spammers and launching a pilot program to whitelist them out of spam filters:

‘Oh no no no, you opted out of messages from giveusyourmoneyandvoteforus(at)politicalparty1, this message is from giveusyourmoneandvoteforusy(at)politicalparty2, totally different so the original opt-out choice doesn’t apply. If you want to opt out of this sender’s emails that’ll require marking this sender’s messages as undesirable, and this opt-out will of course not apply to tomorrow’s messages which will come from a totally different group that just so happens to have a very similar email address as ours.’

Finally, it’s a bit of sarcasm about objections to the idea that long copyright terms are necessary to motivate creators:

I don’t know what you’re talking about really, I mean I can’t imagine that I’m alone in having been utterly bereft of any interest in creating anything until I learned that my great grandchildren would be able to act as gatekeepers for it.

Indeed it was only after I learned that anything I created, built upon what had come before, would be locked up and kept out of reach of others that might want to continue the cycle of creativity that I had any interest in creating works at all, so I can safely say that setting copyright to last decades after I was turned into a pile of ashes was the real spark that fueled my creativity in the first place.

That’s all for this week, folks!