Legal shenanigans around the public domain. My understanding of the law here is that companies are under no obligation to provide public domain works that they have copies of, but that anyone who obtains such a copy can redistribute it. I don't know how the law works with "intent to distribute" as in the original case, but in this case I suspect he'd be ok since he was careful to take only public domain works. Unless he violated a hacking law somehow (unlikely, given the fairly trivial things that were required in the first attack), or ran afoul of the contract (very likely, given the all-encompassing nature of most click-through agreements these days).

It would be interesting to try to quantify quite how many public domain works are locked up inside paywalls. Easier to come up with a number of works than with a valuation on their economic value.

Conspiracy-theoryesque report of movie industry not releasing a report stating that "pirates" purchase more than non-pirates.

The interesting point here for me is not the smoking gun or the conspiracy theory or somesuch. Rather, I've assumed for a while that such evidence has made it into the hands of executives, either via the public domain or via commissioned reports. What's clear is that the decision-making process has simply ignored the evidence over and over again. It's not a phenomenon unique to one industry (or government, or even sometimes academia), sadly. For all the rise in "data scientist" positions at corporations, for all Netflix and Google's success, evidence is still a second class citizen.

New Pandora/Last.fm competitor: Spotify.

Electronics giant Ericsson takes a boldly moderate stand on piracy and anti-piracy.