Soon after this episode aired, I was at pub trivia and insisted on referencing the song for our team name.

Hyperbolic, sure, but I also don't have faith that Buzzfeed was doing this for the betterment of humanity. They wanted drama, and they got it.

the left as a whole

There really is a huge difference between scrutinizing and desperately searching through someone's public statements in order to find something to get offended by. The latter is what happened. This is not a good faith effort.

Am I mischaracterizing your argument? Did you have more to say than, "no one actually thinks that, jeez"?

Ah yes, the "u mad bro".

Oh, well, if everybody thinks so.

What you've just done here is informally known as a "motte and bailey" argument. That is, when confronted with a difficult to defend aspect of your position (the "bailey"), you disavow that aspect and retreat to something much easier to defend (the "motte"), then pretend the original aspect was never even part of your…

Assuming you wanted a serious response, I think the issue is more that comedians should be, by-and-large, able to make some shitty jokes on twitter without it being this whole fucking thing. And we're talking about a few jokes over the course of literally years (of course then the response is, "it only takes one to…

Also, after just listening to it, that's barely true. He's mostly using an E blues scale, despite the song being in E major, so it makes for some clashing harmonies.

Right! It's actually profoundly lazy, since those minor pentatonic shapes are just about the simplest licks that a rock guitar player can pull out. What is Tommy Shaw on about?

Yeah, that's a facet of copyright law that bugs the hell out of me. This came up a few years ago when Jonathan Coulton's arrangement of "Baby Got Back" was used without attribution on Glee. He had no recourse whatsoever, because as an arranger, he had no rights to the derivative work.

This is absolutely the first case with an outcome like this. A jury was convinced that two melodies that have nothing in common (remember, the parts of the song that you are convinced Pharrell stole, and twirled his moustache while doing so, were not copyrightable and therefore not part of the jury discussion) were…

You're taking them saying, "that's a great sound, we should do something like that" and turning them into Scooby Doo villains.

Do you know this song? Which part of that short string sample that makes up the underlying beat of the song did the Rolling Stones write? The egregious part of that case is that the part the Verve were accused of stealing doesn't appear in the Rolling Stones song, at all. Keith Richards didn't write it. And as…

I know it's just an approximation, but would mind showing your work? By my calculations, only about 87% of music coming out today is effecting a negative impact on our children and ourselves with its connection to and glorification of crime, drugs, sex, profanity, greed, murder, etc, and I'm just wondering how you got…

Nitpicking: it doesn't set a legal precedent, at least not yet. The jury decision applies to the facts of this case alone.

If you tell me you're going to break into my house, then I call the cops when you show up on my porch, am I being "preemptive"?

That "basically" is doing a lot of work.

I mean, it's kind of subtle stuff, which is also why some musicians are getting antsy. If you can make a jury buy this, you can convince them of anything involving sheet music.