This week, our first place winner on the insightful side came in response to the UK’s absurd cartoon-based IP education program for kids. PaulT offered some interesting additional perspective on “Nancy and the Meerkats”:
This made me giggle. Meerkats have become rather popular in the UK, largely due to an entertaining series of commercials for the insurance comparison website Compare The Market (featuring a bunch of Russian meerkats discussing a website called Compare The Meerkat). The success has gone far beyond the commercials themselves, with all sorts of merchandising and other services wholly unrelated to the insurance product having sprung up. There’s little reason to think that the choice of animal here is anything other than an attempt to reference something the kids would already be familiar with in positive light.
In other words, they’re essentially trying to reach the kiddies about the evils of infringement by appropriating the successful work of someone else, and leveraging the audience that someone else built by copying their product.
“As TorrentFreak points out, the inclusion of a parody of Ed Sheeran is more than a bit eyebrow-raising, considering just how open to and grateful for piracy and filesharing Sheeran has been”
Not really. That would assume intellectual honesty and a level of self-awareness that someone openly lying in this way would not possess. Certainly not people willing to copy someone else’s product for a propaganda piece on how evil copying stuff is.
In second place, we’ve got a message from SteveMB to the democrats who voted to extend the NSA’s 702 surveillance program:
Memo to Congressional Democrats: The predictions of a “Blue Wave” in November are not based on enduring physical phenomena like tides and eclipses. They are based on the likelihood that voters in November will continue to be pissed off at the Trumpanzee while not becoming likewise pissed off at you. If you insist on pissing away the latter, don’t come running to me for an explanation of “what happened?!”
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’re not letting the UK’s anti-piracy cartoons off the hook after only one comment, so here’s another response from PaulT, this time to an old and stupid analogy:
“You wouldn’t download a car, would you?”
As is my usual answer to that particular piece of idiocy – if the car could be freely duplicated without any real cost and no loss of use for the owners of any other car on the road? Yes, I would. Just like many people started downloading their movies instead of being forced to sit through that unskippable crap on their legally purchased DVDs.
Next, it’s an anonymous musing on what happens when the kids turn out to be, y’know, not stupid:
Imagine if one of those kids knew about the problem in the youtube system. Would they be the one to respond well to this message?
“Teacher, if copyright is important and must be respected, why did *insert favorite youtuber* get his video taken down for something he made? Did they steal the copyright from him?”
Either the teacher will have no answer; stumble for an answer in front of the kid; or they will be blunt about it.
“They don’t respect our rights, but they want to force us to respect theirs.”
Over on the funny side, our first place comment is an anonymous response to the latest media freakout about changes to the Facebook news feed:
If you liked this article on the dangers of relying on social media, don’t forget to like and subscribe by clicking on the bell. Also retweet us, share on Pintrest, post on Reddit, message your friends using snapchat, take selfies of you watching the videos, and give us a shoutout on your “XXX reacts to this article!” video you make on Youtube.
Did I miss any “Teh Socials?”
In second place, we’ve got an anonymous reply to one of our regular critics whining about an “anomaly” or something (I can’t be bothered to figure out what he’s on about):
Congratulations you’ve found your one millionth anomaly!
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got a proposal from DannyB for the copyright troll facing a judge who questions the very existence of their “experts”:
Can’t some of the experts submit depositions stating that the other experts actually exist? Then those experts can swear that the first group also exists.
Finally, we’ve got an anonymous commenter on our post about Kodak’s strange blockchain plans, going straight to the logical conclusion of anti-piracy obsession:
Print screen is the work of the devil and needs to be criminalize at any cost.
That’s all for this week, folks!
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Author: Leigh Beadon