“I wish you hadn’t told me you watched it illegally,” said Bonneville, choosing words that suggested he shouldn’t be writing dialogue for the nobleman otherwise known as the Earl of Grantham. “That’s really pissing me off. Shame on you. Be ashamed.”

Like so many other nerdy "Downton" fans, I also greedily consumed the Christmas special over the holidays in some dark corner of the Internet -- but without feeling any such shame.

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Levine, a former Billboard executive editor who has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, asks, effectively: Can the culture business survive the digital age? It’s a welcome reconsideration after the cheerleading that has greeted the Web and the structural changes in the U.S. economy. We spoke to the Berlin- and New York-based Levine about how we got here and where we go next.

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Authors made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated. (The arrangement -- which helps to account for the fulsome flattery of dedicatory epistles -- seems odd to us, but it had an impressive stability, remaining in place until the invention of copyright in the 18th century.)

We're so accustomed to thinking of copyright as the foundation of a writer's livelihood that it's difficult to imagine how authors could survive without it. Yet we may need to start doing just that.

Our current copyright laws and (often ham-fisted) attempts to enforce them have many critics, but you don't see a lot of people advocating their complete eradication. They don't really need to. The biggest threat to copyright comes from the advent of digital reproduction, which has made piracy much, much easier. Reform could well be beside the point; copyright seems poised to die the death of a million cut-and-pastes.

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Your answers to these questions are probably based on the 1939 MGM (now Warner Bros.) classic, "The Wizard of Oz," and not the 1900 fairy tale "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." And unfortunately, this could mean trouble for Sam Raimi and James Franco's new star-studded project, "Oz, the Great and Powerful," according to a new ruling set by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

See, for a while now the characters in "The Wizard of Oz" have been considered public domain, which is why there are so many strange adaptations  ("Return to Oz" being the most terrifying), since no one has to pay any royalties on the story. But the circuit is now clarifying that this doesn't include the iconic imagery that was created for the Judy Garland film:

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In the sequel, Ed Helms' character, Stu, wakes up before his wedding with a design that is clearly supposed to be taken from Tyson's own tat (the boxer appears in both "The Hangover" and its sequel).

In case you haven't memorized what Mike Tyson's facial tattoo looks like, here is a refresher:

The judge ruled that although Whitmill may have a copyright case, he couldn't delay the film's release, which Warner Bros. has already paid $80 million to promote. U.S. District Court Judge Catherine D. Perry did agree that Whitmill had a strong case, however, but that the film's delay would hurt third parties such as movie theaters and distributors.

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The story, according to Azi Paybarah, is that in 2008, Padraic Sheridan, owner of Murphy & Gonzales restaurant in New York, wanted to advertise that his establishment would be playing the 2008 vice presidential debate. So on his restaurant's website, he put up the official portraits of Palin and then-Senator Joe Biden.

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In the latest case, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains, Sony has sued computer security researchers:

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If upheld, the verdict would be one of the largest in a patent lawsuit.

Last Friday, the jury in Tyler, Texas, found that Apple infringed on three patents held by Mirror Worlds LLC, a company founded by Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter to commercialize his ideas.

The patents cover characteristic features on Apple's Macintosh computers, iPods and iPhones. The technologies include Cover Flow, which lets users flip through album covers and other content as if through a stack of cards; Time Machine, which performs automatic backups; and Spotlight, which is software for searching computer hard drives.

Over the weekend, Apple asked the U.S. District Court to hold off on imposing the jury award, saying there were still issues that needed to be addressed. Among other things, Apple objects to the way the damages were calculated.

Apple has not commented further on the case. Lawyers for Mirror Worlds did not return requests for comment.

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A key U.S. Senate committee will almost certainly vote this week to censor the Internet. A fast-track bill designed to whack copyright infringement is vastly more than that, and if it's passed and signed into law it will put America into a league with China and Saudi Arabia, among others, as a nation that makes sure most of its citizens won't find information that a tiny, elite group deems improper for their eyes.

Who's behind it? I hardly have to tell you that Hollywood and the rest of the copyright cartel have persuaded their acolytes in Congress that it's time to clamp down, and hard. The cartel is absolutely indifferent to the collateral damage it would cause -- and that damage would be enormous.

The bill, S. 3804, is called the "Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act" (COICA) -- yet another dishonest conflating of infringement and counterfeiting, but that's standard for lawmakers. A chief sponsor is, disgracefully, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat who has stood tall for liberty in other contexts. But he's been in love with Hollywood and its money for ages.

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As CNET's Declan McCullagh reports from a conference in Aspen, Colo., Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, complained about "loopholes" in the current copyright system. But what he calls loopholes are among the few parts of the law that remotely temper the absolute control that the RIAA and its allies, mainly in the movie business, want copyright holders to have over everything digital.

Specifically, the entertainment industry is looking to enforce copyright by getting third parties to do some of the dirty work. In particular, the industry wants companies such as search engines and Internet service providers -- the latter is typically your phone or cable company -- to keep an eagle eye on what you do with your own computer, inspecting what you download and upload in granular ways. This is the rough equivalent of getting your phone company to listen to your calls to make sure you aren't planning anything illegal.

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These wins for customer freedom center around a technology broadly known as DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management -- methods used by hardware and software companies to allow customers only certain rights. It should more properly be called Digital Restrictions Management, because that's the real aim of DRM. People have found ways to break or work around DRM, but federal law makes it illegal to do so in most circumstances.

The cracks in DRM's legal facade are starting to grow, too. On Monday, the Copyright Office and librarian of Congress said, among other things, that it's OK to A) "jailbreak" your phone, thereby letting you install software not approved by the phone seller; and B) use brief excerpts of DVD videos in other works. Renewing a previously granted exception to federal copyright law, the office also said it was OK to unlock your phone so that you can use it with a different mobile network.

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Matthew Lesko, known for his distinctive question-mark suits and his high-energy infomercials promising "free money from the government," says McCain used video of him to attack GOP rival J.D. Hayworth without asking -- and Lesko's not happy about it.

Lesko appears three times in a 1 1/2-minute Web video McCain released last week. The video pokes fun at Hayworth for hawking free government money in a 2007 infomercial.

"I'm amazed that these people just do things without requesting. I would've said yes," Lesko told The Associated Press. "I'm just shocked at the impoliteness that people do this stuff. There's no remorse."

Lesko said he hasn't ruled out suing McCain for copyright infringement, but said he's not keen on the idea of involving lawyers. Mostly, he wants politicians to be polite and ask permission before using other people's faces in their advertisements.

The McCain camp said its use of Lesko was clearly allowed under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.

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You'll recall that a federal judge slapped down Viacom's claim that Google's YouTube video service, by allowing its copyrighted videos to be posted on the site, was contributing to copyright infringement. The judge said YouTube was following provisions of the current copyright law that say, among other things, that a site owner is not immediately responsible for what others post there. However, once notified by a copyright holder that it's hosting infringing work, the site is obliged to take it down.

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Echoing most news media, the New York Times called it "a major victory for Google in its battle with media companies," but yesterday's decision (pdf) by a federal judge in a closely watched copyright case was, most of all, a victory for free expression.

U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton tossed out a Viacom lawsuit against Google's YouTube video site, in which the media conglomerate said YouTube, by allowing its copyrighted videos to be posted on the site, was was contributing to copyright infringement.

At issue, in its most basic form, was whether the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) meant what it said. Boiled down and oversimplified, safe harbor means this: If you host other people's work, you are not immediately responsible for what they post on your site. Once notified by a copyright holder that you're hosting infringing work, you're obliged to take it down.

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Wednesday's ruling by U.S. District Judge Louis Stanton in the closely watched case further affirmed the protections offered to online service providers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The 1998 law offers immunity when service providers promptly remove illegal materials submitted by users once they are notified of a violation.

That safe harbor had helped persuade Google to buy YouTube for $1.76 billion in 2006, even though some of its own executives had earlier branded the video-sharing service as "a 'rogue enabler' of content theft," according to internal documents unearthed in the case.

Although it's a major victory for Google and other Internet service providers, Wednesday's decision won't end a legal brawl that has already dragged on for more than three years. Viacom vowed to keep the case alive in appeals court, a process likely to last another year or two.

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And we all bring our own axes to the party. Today's entry, "Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club," a post at the group blog Balkinization by Christina Mulligan, a visiting fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, is a perfect example. (Thanks to a tweet from Glyn Moody for the tip.)

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In the fall of 1987, a freelance reporter named Michael Dolan learned that judge Robert Bork kept an account at Potomac Video, a D.C. rental shop. This was at the height of the contentious and ultimately failed Senate confirmation hearings for Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court -- so naturally, Dolan thought there was a story here, and he went to work on getting a peek at Bork's video rental history.

It wasn't hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork's movie file. "There sure are a lot of them," the assistant manager replied. "Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?"

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork's rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork's taste in movies was itself unremarkable ("First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there's not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R," Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left -- including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork's nomination.

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The animators of this very good-looking film have a lot of fun with classical Chinese landscapes and other familiar tropes of traditional Chinese art. But one scene jumps out. Po, the panda with unlikely martial arts aspirations, has made it inside a temple storing a variety of legendary weapons and other hallowed items suffused with kung fu lore. Po, the kind of geek who memorizes every possible piece of minutiae about his chosen obsession, shudders with delight as he rushes from one object to another.

Finally, he comes to a painting depicting an ancient exploit by kung fu heroes. He exclaims: "I've only seen paintings of this painting!"

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The recording industry has long sent legal letters to campuses when it suspects that a student might trading music, but there's been a sudden surge of such letters -- a mysterious surge, considering that network managers at the colleges have not seen any increase in the volume of songs being traded.

So why is the music business sending more letters?

Inside Higher Ed cites college officials who suspect that "the recording industry has altered the standards it uses to allege illegal behavior." Rather than targeting only the students who trade songs, the industry is also going after students who "have stored downloaded music in a folder visible to other users, opening the way to a potential violation."

This is a familiar music industry claim -- the "making available" offense. In several court cases, officials have argued that that I should be punished not only for giving you a copyrighted song, but also for putting a song in a place where you might take it. I should be punished, the industry says, even if you didn't take the song.

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