This week, John McCain’s reelection campaign found itself in the bizarre position of asking YouTube to restrict access to one of the senator’s own campaign ads, citing a copyright violation.

A copyright fight is brewing in Europe this week as the deadline after which two key WWII-era texts will fall within the public domain steadily approaches. In Europe, a book becomes public domain 70 years after the author’s death, on the first day of January. This Friday, January 1st, both Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf will enter the public domain.

As every website has been attempting to inform you since 2012, copy-pasting several paragraphs of dense legal voodoo onto your Facebook wall does not somehow exempt you from the terms of service that bind all Facebook users. If Facebook decides it wants to start using your content in some way you don’t like, your legal options include: don’t put that content on Facebook. Or: stop using Facebook altogether. If you won’t believe us, please believe John Oliver.

The annual ritual of everyone you know sharing a meaningless copyright disclaimer on Facebook has begun again. And, just in case you didn’t get the message the first half-dozen times this has happened, you can’t opt yourself out of Facebook’s terms of service or change what they’re allowed to do with your content by copy-pasting some pseudo-legal boilerplate into your timeline.

It used to be any idiot with a wifi connection could copy-paste someone else’s joke, tweet it and wait for the sweet sponsorship cash to roll in. Those days are over, technically speaking.

The New York Times reports that an Australian publicist representing the bystander who filmed North Charleston police officer Michael Slager kill Walter Scott earlier this month recently sent cease and desist letters to news outlets demanding a fee for future plays.

It's 2015, and your friends are sharing that block of pseudo-legal gibberish that supposedly prevents Facebook from using their "copyrighted content." This copyright notice means exactly the same thing it did when they posted it in 2012, 2013, and 2014: jack shit.

Funk legend George Clinton, of Parliament, Funkdelic, Parliament-Funkadelic, and more, appeared on last night's episode of Tavis Smiley to hawk his new book, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir. That title makes me more smiley than Tavis.

David Slater, the British nature photographer whose camera equipment was stolen by a selfie-mad macaque in 2011, has made repeated attempts to remove the famous photos that resulted from Wikimedia Commons, a database of royalty-free media from the organization behind Wikipedia. Wikimedia refused, claiming that Slater does not own the images' copyright.

Christian rappers Flame and LeCrae are going after Katy Perry in court, claiming her hit "Dark Horse" ripped off a 2008 song called "Joyful Noise," tarnishing it with "witchcraft, paganism, black magic and Illuminati imagery."

Good news for those of you who have been longing to shop your Jane Austen/Sherlock Holmes mashup you've got in a drawer to book publishers: The Seventh Circuit has now ruled that the character of Sherlock Holmes is (mostly) in the public domain.

The clock is running down for Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload founder whose riches and eccentricities make him a kind of hacker Howard Hughes. In a last-ditch effort to avoid extradition from New Zealand to the United States for trial, Dotcom's offering $5 million to anyone who can prove corruption in his case.

A kerfuffle is haunting the Marxist internet—a kerfuffle about copyright.

Film director Quentin Tarantino has filed a copyright complaint in U.S. District Court in California against Gawker claiming infringement over this Defamer post, which included a link to a web site that was hosting a copy of The Hateful Eight, an unproduced script he has written.

Makeup artist Samantha Ravndahl took to Reddit's "Makeup Addiction" subforum earlier today to ask a "slightly unrelated" question: What do I do if Lil' Kim stole one of my photos to use as art for her latest album?

The lawsuit over the song of the summer just got a little hotter: Marvin Gaye's family reportedly turned down a six-figure settlement and have decided to continue with a planned lawsuit, believing that a court will find that "Blurred Lines" is a blatant ripoff of Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" (it kind of is).

Doug Sehorne, a hardcore King James Baptist Evangelist who describes himself as an "old-fashioned bible preacher," recently released his latest e-book entitled Bible Principles of Child Discipline from the Book of Proverbs).

Want to buy a PRISM t-shirt? You can't: Someone is claiming copyright over the logo of the vast NSA surveillance operation, and they took down my Zazzle store.

Television host Philip "Dr. Phil" McGraw's Peteski Productions filed a copyright-infringement suit yesterday against Gawker Media. Peteski accuses Deadspin of having harmed the ratings of two episodes of the Dr. Phil program by posting video clips from the show—in which McGraw interviewed Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, the confessed perpetrator of the Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax—online.

Just like the tweedy detective, Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts are obsessive, fanatical, and even controlling. Hence—Sherlock Holmes and the Clamorous Debate Over Public Domain Rights.