Now let's be fair. Amazon earned its monopoly (or near-monopoly) legitimately. They didn't muscle anyone else out of the market; they built an amazing product—the proverbial "better mousetrap." No one before or since has managed to make buying and downloading e-books as pushbutton-simple as the Kindle. You push a button, you get an e-book on your device—no fiddling around with sideloading or copying files necessary. That moved e-books from being a super-geek early adopter's toy into something Grandma and Grandpa could enjoy.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the decision in a landmark antitrust case that explains that companies may legally have monopolies if they earned them fair and square, through their own products or infrastructure—and they can't be compelled to share the fruits of their labor with anyone else.

But even then, I didn't buy from Amazon myself. As one of those super-geek early adopters, I was a member of Fictionwise's Buywise discount club that let me get some great deals on books. But agency pricing effectively killed that club dead, and then killed Fictionwise itself dead, and Barnes & Noble was nice enough to let me copy most, not all, of the e-books I'd bought and paid for over to its servers. (Thank goodness for Apprentice Alf!) And they weren't the only smaller competitors to get knocked out of the market, either.

All because Apple wanted to sell e-books for its iPad, but didn't want to have to wrestle in the low-margin dirt with Amazon. I only wish they'd had to suffer a harsher penalty for it in the end.

Given that the publisher settlement was a bit less than half as big as Apple's, expect to get back a little over twice the amount you got back from the publisher settlement. It depends how many e-books you bought. I got like $15 or so last time around, I think.

No, they won't. Really, this case isn't going to change much of anything; it's been so long since the original circuit decision that the clock ran out on the cooling-off period and publishers were allowed to renegotiate their contracts. After some long and arduous negotiations (perhaps you remember hearing about the big Amazon/Hachette feud a year or so back?) they reimposed agency pricing, legally this time.

Don't expect Big Pub to lower its e-book prices any, either. They're still too intent on trying to strangle the e-book market in its crib, for the sake of protecting the remaining paper bookstores.

No one will ever know "how the voting went." SCOTUS doesn't elaborate on its certiorari decisions. All we know is that they couldn't scrape together four judges who were interested enough to want to hear it.

Taking a wild-assed guess, the reason for this is probably that it was basically a bog-standard antitrust case, with no new and interesting issues for the court to resolve, and no obvious mistakes made by a lower court for SCOTUS to resolve. (Apple and its advocates threw up a lot of fuss, but every antitrust defendant thinks they're a special case—and it usually turns out that they aren't.) The Court has better uses for its time than rehashing decisions the lower courts got right.

It's actually very simple to get Google Services, including the Play Store, on the Fire. You don't even have to root it—just enable developer mode, activate USB debugging, install some drivers on your PC, and sideload a software package. Then, boom: you've got the Play Store and nearly every app I've tried works just fine. (Oddly enough, Google Inbox is one that doesn't.) As a side effect, it also disables Special Offers for free.

I gather you can go further with further hacking, outright replacing Fire OS with CyanogenMod or whatever, but I've never felt the need to. I have other pure Android devices, and this Fire the way it is is good enough.

I've been limiting my Karma data buying to when they have it on buy-one-get-one sale, so I get 20 GB for $100. (And it's $100 I didn't even pay for personally, given I've still got $1,600 of referral credit left.) The only thing is, there's no way to know when they're going to run another sale, so I typically just buy a couple of bundles when it is and cross my fingers it'll happen again before my last purchase runs out.

The thing that makes Karma worth using in my book—and the thing I personally use it for—is its "Refuel" plan, where you can get data for $10 a gigabyte. That's a reasonable price, basically on par with what Google's Project Fi offers, and even better, every so often they sell bandwidth for half price, so $5 a gigabyte. I don't use much mobile data, but having a Karma hotspot through which I can lets me save money on my Project Fi bill.

(Plus, well, I've earned over $2,000 in referral credit from people buying routers with my referral code, so I'm going to be getting my mobile Internet "free" for quite some time, assuming Karma doesn't go under.)

And yet, according to the original article, the operator of Slysoft was found guilty of copyright violation under Antiguan law and got fined all of $30,000. It's just that he's appealed, and the appeal has yet to be tried. (Though even if he lost, I imagine that $30,000 would represent pocket change to Slysoft.)

Personally, I hope that Hollywood continues to be stymied. I paid $100 for a lifetime sub to AnyDVD HD. :)

That's why I added the update right at the top explaining about that before the story even got picked up on Slashdot.