In the sort of bureaucratic clusterfuck that can only happen in Russia, the band Deep Purple has been fined several thousand dollars for “illegally” performing their own songs.  You’ll have to follow the link for the details, because typing them out would just make  my head hurt.

750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy

Any time the army of lobbiests employed by media conglomerates attach congress demanding stricter IP laws, their two biggest weapons are a pair of numbers.  They claim that IP piracy costs the US 750K jobs and $250 billion per year.  Ars Technica dug into the history of those two statistics, and discovered that (unsurprisingly) they were essentially pulled out of thin air.  They are both based on studies that are decades old, and extrapolated using methods that are dodgy at best, and downright facetious at worst.