Enlarge (credit: Financial Times, Dreamstime)

Mario Salieri was shooting a pornographic movie in a lavish Prague villa two decades ago when he first caught sight of the computer geeks who were about to upend his industry.

“The owner of the villa asked me if we could offer a sandwich to a young computer programmer who had been renting a room,” says Mr. Salieri. “The boy was pale and visibly hungry.”

A few years later, Mr. Salieri discovered that “the boy” had bought his first Rolls-Royce Phantom. Like other coders, he had made a fortune selling advertising on the early free-to-watch porn sites, which today attract hundreds of millions of visits every day.

Enlarge / Awkward Thanksgiving portrait, next-gen console edition. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Kyle Wiens is the cofounder and CEO of iFixit , an online repair community and parts retailer internationally renowned for its open source repair manuals and product teardowns.

There aren't enough game consoles in the world for our upcoming locked-down holiday. Good luck finding a PS5 for Christmas. As Nintendo similarly struggles to keep up with demand, the number of people searching iFixit for Switch repair guides has more than tripled since last year. Traffic to our Joy-Con controller repair page started growing dramatically on March 14—the day after President Trump declared a national emergency. It’s been surging ever since. At a time when so many of us are turning to games for fun, stress relief, and social connection, it is imperative for our collective sanity that we press every game console into service.

But if you talk with expert repair technicians like Bryan Harwell, they’ll tell you that significant obstacles stand in the way.

Enlarge / A sign featuring the YouTube logo, outside the YouTube Space studios in London on June 4, 2019. (credit: Olly Curtis | Future | Getty Images )

GitHub has reversed its decision to boot YouTube-dl, a popular tool for archiving YouTube videos, from its platform. The company restored repositories this week after "additional information" convinced it that an archiving tool is not in and of itself a copyright violation—no matter what the music industry says.

The repositories in question got shut down in late October, before coming back yesterday. "We share developers' frustration with this takedown—especially since this project has many legitimate purposes," GitHub explained in a corporate blog post . "Our actions were driven by processes required to comply with laws like the DMCA that put platforms like GitHub and developers in a difficult spot. And our reinstatement, based on new information that showed the project was not circumventing a technical protection measure (TPM), was inline with our values of putting developers first."

The initial takedown occurred after the Recording Industry Association of America filed a claim with Microsoft-owned GitHub arguing that the code in those repositories was inherently illegal under US copyright law. At a high level, the law in question basically makes it illegal to crack or bypass DRM in any way, except for a handful of enumerated exemptions .

Enlarge (credit: YouTube / Getty / Aurich Lawson )

A popular tool used for archiving YouTube videos, YouTube-dl, is gone from GitHub after the Recording Industry Association of America filed a claim arguing that the code is inherently illegal under copyright law.

GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, removed 18 projects on Friday that previously hosted versions of YouTube-dl, a Python library that allows for the downloading of YouTube video and audio files. Those repositories now display a message reading, "This repository is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice. We have disabled public access to the repository."

Although the notice is framed as a DMCA issue, the takedown notice from the RIAA, dated Friday, does not make claim that YouTube-dl is an act of copyright infringement. Instead, it alleges that the code itself is a violation of a different section of Us copyright law (as well as German copyright law), because the "clear purpose of this source code is to... circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and [to] reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use."

Enlarge / Dr. Drew Pinsky having opinions on March 9, 2020 in New York City. (credit: Jason Mendez | Getty Images )

Everyone who is (or wants to be) anyone seems to have some opinion or advice about the current COVID-19 crisis. Many of those opinions have been, frankly, quite bad. And someone who makes his money from media appearances trying to disappear those opinions from the Internet after realizing those opinions were, in fact, quite bad, doesn't help matters any.

Dr. Drew Pinsky is up there with Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil on the list of "celebrity doctors whose name you probably know." He soared to fame in the 1990s and 2000s on the back of his TV and radio advice show Loveline . Pinsky, who performs and markets himself as Dr. Drew, is indeed a medical doctor—but he is not an epidemiologist or specialist in infectious disease. He earned his MD from the University of Southern California in 1984 and went to work as a physician, specializing in the treatment of addiction and chemical dependencies, in the decades that followed.

But not being an expert in infectious disease did not stop him from being widely dismissive of the potential threat from COVID-19 throughout the year, even as the threat continued to grow. Dr. Drew is taking the threat seriously, now that more than 330,000 people inside the United States have tested positive for the disease and more than 10,000 have died. On Saturday, he released a video apologizing for his earlier comments, which he said were "wrong."

Enlarge / A model of the pirate ship Queen Anne's Revenge in the North Carolina Museum of History. (credit: Qualiesin )

A state government that infringes someone's copyright doesn't have to worry about getting sued, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday. The high court held that federalism trumps copyright law, effectively giving states a free pass.

The case pitted a North Carolina videographer, Frederick Allen, against the state of North Carolina. The state was the legal owner of a famous shipwreck, the Queen Anne's Revenge. It was the flagship of legendary pirate Blackbeard until it ran aground off the coast of North Carolina in 1718. A company discovered the wreck in 1996 and got a contract from the state to do recovery work. The company hired Allen to document those efforts with photos and videos.

Allen spent more than a decade documenting the recovery operation, and he retained copyright protection for his work. But North Carolina published some of his photos on its website without permission. Eventually, the state agreed to pay Allen $15,000 in compensation. But then North Carolina published his work online a second time without permission, and Allen sued.