It's especially odd given that they're taken from a Garth Ennis Punisher story (excepting Grotto), and they were definitely played for Ennis's usual queasy brand of laughs there.

I'll give them some credit for treating him much more brutally; he's not really that comedic, and Matt crushes his hands and throws his car keys into the river instead of just tossing him around a bit like in the comics.

That was Bill Mantlo over in Spectacular Spider-Man, not Miller. Miller just played him as a psychopath whose desire to execute major criminals threatened the underpinnings of the justice system.

The argument is about whether the IP laws are just or not; why would anyone be bound to respect behaviors that comport themselves to unjust or unnatural (in the Enlightenment sense) laws?

IP is not a "natural" right in any sense; it exists quite literally as a construct of government, and one relatively recently developed and ridiculously extended over time. IP law, in its present state, is utter bullshit and deserves neither respect nor obedience.

And they're charged with theft? Or with violating IP rights?

How can you be anonymous if you've always been Tim?

He was so much cooler when he was Shreck over in the Shadowline comics.

Says the guy whose avatar and screen name are someone else's IP.

Sort of. It's what pays for future episodes, perhaps, but more accurately it's what pays *back* the network or production company that has *already* paid the creative people — cast, directors, crew, and so forth — for the work.

Data can be replicated, and intellectual property is a kind of convenient metaphor for something very different than physical assets and simple theft. And IP is also harder to defend in some ways; why exactly is it wrong to copy data for personal use, one might ask? You wouldn't steal a car, ut…well, stealing a car…

Let's all imagine the things AlwaysBeenTim must be doing, even if ABT denies them here!

Entertainment?

Is photocopying an entire book that you checked out of the library theft? What if you returned the book afterwards?

Don't praise the machine!

So does the way Maureen Dowd writes about politics.

If there's one things the kids love, it's movies in which architects make really long speeches about artistic integrity

What the what?

The Long Halloween suffers for two things: first, the realization that the best parts of the Harvey Dent material are actually just Loeb referencing Batman Annual #14 by Andy Helfer and Chris Sprouse, and Loeb repeating the "mystery villain gathers the Bat-rogues after Batman fights them all in sequence" structure for…

That's a good Joker story as well. I also really like the Joker's feud with Luthor in the Dave Gibbons/Steve Rude World's Finest miniseries and his appearance in John Byrne's Superman #9, more for the last line of the story than anything else in it.
"Why go to all this trouble? Why come to Metropolis, endanger my…