You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not -- indeed, morally, you cannot -- keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends ... Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

In July 2011, Swartz was arrested on charges of illegally downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an online archive of scholarly articles. Facing a maximum possible prison sentence of 35 years and a fine of as much as a million dollars, Swartz killed himself Friday night, just two days after prosecutors rejected a plea bargain deal that would have allowed him to avoid jail time.

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Nestled within the "Rights" sections of Instagram's updated terms, Instagram and Facebook can share or sell photos (to ad agencies, for example) without notifying users or compensating them for it:

"To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."

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Indeed, supporters of anti-piracy legislation in Congress have confessed their ignorance of how copyright and the Internet work, saying the details were best left to the “nerds.” Lawmakers soon heard from the nerds, though, as an online insurgency spread to thwart the Stop Online Piracy Act, galvanizing opposition across the political spectrum in a novel way, from the Creative Commons left to right-wing blogs such as RedState. The campaign epitomizes a promising new turn in American politics, as critics of intellectual property law finally find an audience and, more important, the makings of a political constituency.

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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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To be more specific, the court ruled that human genes, when isolated from their natural genetic housing (the chromosome), can be patented. The decision has been welcomed warmly by the biotech industry, which can now claim dominion over bits and pieces of our genetic blueprints. However, the ruling has been panned by critics who say it's unethical and counterproductive to label human genes as intellectual property. 

The decision revolves around a company called Myriad Genetics, which holds the patents to two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, which are linked to the development of ovarian and breast cancers. Myriad  acquired the patents in question years ago, and markets a product called BRACAnalysis, which screens for predisposition to ovarian and breast cancer. The company charges $4,000 for the service. With the patents, it has the exclusive rights to isolate and analyze the two genes.

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I'll bet you never blamed monopoly control of hot tub electronic control systems or abusive intellecutal property law litigation!

I sure didn't (and believe me, I have been baffled by many a hot tub), and as my readers know, I'll blame monopoly control and out-of-control intellectual property laws for almost any sin, at the drop of, uh, a bathing suit.

But Jamie Love's IP-Health Digest alert, which normally concentrates on news from the pharmaceutical sector, dug up a tantalizing snippet of a lawsuit filed by a Californian manufacturer of hot tub electronic control systems claiming that another California company -- the apparent Microsoft of the hot tub world -- was restricting competition via aggressive litigation. Hot tubs and patent infringment? That's got Labor Day weekend written all over it. I had to know more.

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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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Sigismund Hermbstadt ... a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today.

The explanation for this tidbit may at first seem counterintuitive. In the first half of the 19th century, reports Der Spiegel, relying on the research of economic historian Eckhard Hoffner, Germany paid little attention to copyright law, in sharp contrast to Great Britain. The result, argues Hoffner, was a tremendous increase in the amount of published materials, particularly regarding scientific and technical knowledge, made available to the German public. Less regard for intelletectual property translated into a bigger market for producers of content.

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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 wake of the news, you could practically hear the commentariat licking its collective lips. Apple versus Google has everything you could ask for in a tech war. A company that believes in absolute control in a showdown with a company that thrives on exploiting the open Internet; the coolest gadget maker in the world facing off with the cleverest organizer of information. IBM, Microsoft, Nokia ... the giants of ages past are afterthoughts in this struggle.

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The Genentech lobbyists, who appear to be worth every cent the Bay Area biotech firm pays them, came up with two different position statements specially targeted to Republicans and Democrats, in reference to an amendment to the House healthcare bill recently passed by a razor-thin majority.

The Democrats emphasized the job creation aspect of the amendment.

Republicans opposed the bill, but praised a provision that would give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to approve generic versions of expensive biotechnology drugs, along the lines favored by brand-name companies like Genentech.

One important line repeated by at least two representatives: "I do believe the sections relating to the creation of a market for biosimilar products is one area of the bill that strikes the appropriate balance in providing lower cost options."

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I say "official" because there are many Kalashnikov manufacturers dotting the globe, the legacy of an era in which licenses to make the rifle were distributed freely, for ideological purposes. Profit wasn't supposed to be the point of the Soviet Union, after all.

As reported by Benjamin Bidder, a slump in arms exports, high levels of outstanding debt, and the machinations of a mysterious ultranationalist businessman are all plaguing Izhmash. But the real problem may be more akin to the woes currently afflicting the newspaper industry and recorded music business: It's very hard to make a buck when your product is easily copied and widely accessible.

Two years ago, in the post "How Is an AK-47 Like a QWERTY Keyboard," HTWW considered the theory of Oxford University's Phillip Killicoat, as presented in "Weaponomics: The Global Market for Assault Rifles," that the worldwide success of the Kalashnikov owed less to its inherent quality than to its achievement of "path dependent lock in."

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But here's the real shocker: The Swedish Pirate Party, already the third largest political party in Sweden, took 7.1 percent of the Swedish vote and won at least one seat in the European Parliament.

From the Swedish Pirate Party's Web site:

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