#5: "Since the professor's lectures are, presumably, oral and not recorded, he has no copyright in them to begin with. We just studied this in our Copyright Law class - the professor used that very example."

Assume a lecture that is not already recorded. If the student records the professor's lecture verbatim (whether as an audio recording or as a transcript), then copyright does apply because the lecture has just been fixed in a tangible medium. That contemporaneous recording is not infringement (because copyright does not apply until the recording is made), but subsequent copies are.

Good luck on the exam.

We sell academic software to a very niche market. Our sales show a clear drop of 60% to 80% when someone illegally puts a copy up on their web site. When we get that copy taken down, our sales recover.

We can't prove that other forms of file-sharing also reduce our sales, because we can't eliminate the file-sharing in the same way for periods of time to see what happens to our sales. But it's naive to think that file-sharing is advertising that increases our sales when the only measurable form of it so drastically hurts our sales.

The economics are very different in small markets than in large markets. I wouldn't take our experience to mean that Microsoft doesn't benefit from piracy. But we are very badly hurt by it.

"This just seems like an overzealous, misinformed TSA agent."

There are a lot of those, all of them backed up by heavily armed police officers. If we held some of the worst offenders accountable, the rest of the TSA agents would get better informed and the traveling public would have better protection.

There are choices we can make other than snark or sob. I'd encourage people who find the callous and reckless behavior of that TSA employee outrageous to take a few minutes to write to someone who could improve the situation, such as your Congressman, your Senator, the TSA, the mayor of Orlando, Orlando's tourism board, or similar groups. Figure out what should be done, and ask people with political clout to do it. It won't always work, but it's far more likely to accomplish something than just gawking at the wreckage of our society. Here's the letter I sent to Mayor Buddy Dyer of Orlando:

To the Honorable Buddy Dyer,

I am writing to ask you to investigate the recent incident at the Orlando airport where a TSA employee contaminated sterile medical equipment that a 14-year-old child was carrying. A news story about the incident is at:
http://www.wftv.com/irresistible/15511359/detail.html

My family and I have greatly enjoyed our vacations in Orlando, most recently in January. Reading of this incident, however, has us extremely concerned that we will not be safe flying in and out of Orlando airport in the future. A member of my family also depends on sterile medical equipment, and we are unwilling to risk our health by flying through an airport where this sort of behavior
by TSA employees is tolerated.

Orlando's airport has EMTs available, and ready access to people with medical training. When there is a medical or health concern raised by a passenger, personnel at the airport must be taught to call in people with medical training. If a passenger appears unable to breathe, people with medical training should be called. If a passenger says that his health will be endangered by the
actions of an airport worker, people with medical training should be called.

The news story about this reckless TSA employee at the Orlando airport is spreading, as it should. While you do not have direct authority over the TSA employees at the airport, you do have the
political power to ensure a reasonable conclusion to this news story: first, the reckless employee should be located and fired, and second, all airport workers should be taught to call in people with medical training to respond to medical and health concerns.

These two steps would go a long way to restoring our willingness to travel to Orlando, and would protect the safety of the millions of people who travel through Orlando's airport. If done publicly
and assertively, these two steps would allow Orlando to serve as a model to other cities. Thank you for your time and attention to this very serious issue.

So 1 in 600 music downloaders gets sued. Do I really have a 1 in 600 chance of being hit by an asteroid? Or have 26,000 people been hit by asteroids as well and I haven't heard anything about it?

Boston-area police and prosecutors have a history going back to 2004 of calling anything they don't like a hoax device. It started when they were preparing for the Democratic Convention, tons of federal dollars were flying around, and they discovered that they would get more federal money every time they called out the bomb squad for a random object (briefcase, lunch bag, baby stroller, etc.) and every time they arrested someone and charged them with possession of a hoax device. The inevitable result: a huge increase in the bomb squad being called out when there's no reason to suspect a bomb, a bunch of completely false arrests and baseless prosecutions, and a whole lot more federal money for the state and local police to buy vehicles and bomb-squad robots and overtime.