Wait until you hear why.

So you may have heard that there’s a porn parody of Universal’s putative NC-17 rated Fifty Shades of Grey movie, even though Universal hasn’t even cast it yet. And some of those among you who were not aware are now surely nodding and saying “Yes, this was inevitable.” Well, it was also inevitable that Universal would sue the Fifty Shades porn parody for copyright and trademark infringement, which they are doing.

But what wasn’t inevitable was that Smash Pictures, the makers of Fifty Shades of Grey: A XXX Adaptation, would come up with an even moderately clever counter suit.

It didn’t really surprise anyone to find out HBO’s Game of Thrones was the most pirated show of 2012. After all, HBO is a paid subscription service and many people don’t like their limited expensive options in a world immediate entertainment. But I suppose it doesn’t help the cause when one of the people working the show, a director to be more specific, publicly says he doesn’t mind when people pirate his show. And it just so happens that The Copyright Alert System is about to start sending us all notices to stop the illegal downloads. Great timing, dude. 

The new and growing market for eBooks has allowed companies to call into question some of the basic and universal characteristics of reading and owning books. That you can loan them to your friends, for example, or that by purchasing a book you’re also purchasing the ability to read it whenever you want, wherever you want, until you lose it, donate it, give it away, or wear through its well-loved spine.

eBook publishers have, to put it mildly, established that these are qualities of a book that they do not intend to carry over to the new format, which is to a certain extent fine, so long as consumers know what they’re getting into. But the eBook market also has other problems, namely accusations of price fixing, and, due to the combination of software that limits the kind of device a given eBook can be read on and the dominance of the Kindle over the eReader market, bullying tactics. A new lawsuit filed by three independent bookstores is looking to strike at the heart of the problem: the insistance of eReader makers that their books should not be readable on other devices.

Two Tolkien estate stories in one day? Are they trying to steal Beyonce’s thunder or something? 

Ed Kramer, the co-founder of Atlanta, Georgia’s Dragon*Con has been in trouble with the law for years. He’s recently been extradited back to the state on child-molestation charges dating back to 2000 and while he no longer claims association with the convention, he still receives financial compensation from it thanks to shares he holds in the corporation. As a response to the most recent events, some creators are calling for a boycott of Dragon*Con until they take steps to remove Kramer from the institution entirely.

Because, like, you might not survive if you can’t look at things like this. According to a new ruling in Germany, that is.

Well, they aired it, seemingly unchanged. And it’s now for sale in the US iTunes store. They also got in touch with my peeps to basically say that they’re within their legal rights to do this, and that I should be happy for the exposure (even though they do not credit me, and have not even publicly acknowledged that it’s my version – so you know, it’s kind of SECRET exposure). While they appear not to be legally obligated to do any of these things, they did not apologize, offer to credit me, or offer to pay me, and indicated that this was their general policy in regards to covers of covers. It does not appear that I have a copyright claim, but I’m still investigating the possibility (which I consider likely) that they used some or all of my audio. I’ll write something longer and more detailed about this when I can get my head together about it probably in a couple of days. Thanks for your support, but please continue not to burn anything down. — Jonathan Coulton, in a recent update to his blog.

Last night Glee returned after a holiday hiatus with the episode “Sadie Hawkins” and a soft-rock version of “Baby Got Back,” that is unmistakably nerd-rocker Jonathan Coulton’s soft-rock version of “Baby Got Back.” The musician updated fans and readers of his blog this morning with this information on Fox and Glee’s really absurd notion that “exposure” is his payment despite the fact that they have so far refused to publicly credit him with the arrangement. If Coulton hadn’t already had a strong, connected fanbase, nobody might have noticed that he’d been ripped off.

Though the story is still developing, there isn’t really another way to put this: it looks an awful lot like one of the songs Glee is planning to include in its soon-to-be-returning fourth season is a soft-rock cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” In fact, it’s a very specific soft rock cover of “Baby Got Back.” Nerd singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton‘s cover. Which wouldn’t otherwise be a problem, except that Coulton himself was never actually contacted or asked about whether it could be used.

At my last address, my at-the-time roommate and I were dismayed when, one morning, we were slapped with a Digital Millennium Copyright Violation warning by our Internet service provider. The charge was televison-show-specific, and while we’d both been guilty of indiscriminate minor acts of piracy in the past (college, we swear), we were damned if we were going to get blamed for our neighbor’s need to find out what happens on Boardwalk Empire. We scrambled to lock down our easily-hackable connection, and that was that.

If it had been a couple years later, it turns out, we need not have worried. And, as with so many Internet breakthroughs, this score-one-for-the-side-of-the-user all starts with porn.