Buying a CD doesn't give you the right to copy it, a record-company attorney testified in a trial that pit the recording industry against a Native American woman in Minnesota. The single mother of two was successfully sued for using peer-to-peer file sharing to violate numerous copyrights. What may ultimately come to matter more than the verdict were some of the details that emerged along the way.

Don't you just love this bright new Blu-ray world we're living in? To celebrate the great transition, the studios now have hip high-def copyright warnings. This one came from Warner's 10,000 BC. Notice the forceful graphics, the festive colors, the 4:3 aspect ratio. The rounded screen corners that remind me of a 1950s B&W Magnavox--the first TV I remember, delivery medium for countless episodes of Captain Kangaroo. Best of all, it stays onscreen a real long time, and is invulnerable to the track-skip and fast-forward keys, so you have plenty of time to meditate on 5 YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON before your evening entertainment. That'll stop those bootleggers and analog-hole deviants from stealing our precious bodily fluids! Uh, I mean our intellectual property. Or perhaps the studios are just as tone-deaf as ever, wasting the time of law-abiding Blu-ray renters and purchasers to send a message to other people who are impervious to copyright warnings. For the record, I have no intention of ever bootlegging a Blu-ray disc. But all those moments spent watching dopey copyright warnings add up. Couldn't they be shortened to three seconds, or made skippable, to really celebrate a new age of great HD entertainment? I want my life back.

Seventy-nine percent of U.S. consumers still subscribe to pay TV, but that number is dwindling as cord-trimmers, cord-cutters, and cord-nevers cut into the base. That’s the news from PricewaterhouseCoopers in its report “Videoquake 3.0: The Evolution of TV’s Revolution.”

Until recently, no single cable operator was allowed to dominate more than 30 percent of the U.S. market. But a court has thrown out the Federal Communications Commission's market cap, eliminating a rule that's been the law of the land since 1992.