Pac-Man is just his last name. Thus "Ms. Pac-Man", not "Pac-Woman".

I'd argue that it isn't. The "clean room" example is a measure of obviousness: if there is clearly one way to solve a problem, and someone can figure it out simply by being told to produce the outputs, I'd argue that it's obvious. Now, that's not at all what happened with the MPEG_LA. VP8 (or WebM, or whatever) has a ton in common with H.264, which isn't independently likely or obvious given the mature state of the video compression field.

He was fined 100 euro because a single user downloaded a single song illegally. One song. A hundred twenty-five times its retail value. And he didn't even download it. Copyright is out of control.

I think they're related, just not in the way you think they are. A person reads the first story of the lost phone, and realizes that pre-release iPhones are worth a ton of money. Say this person works on the iPhone assembly line for pennies a day. All of a sudden, they figure out they can pocket one little device they work on all day and sell it to any old web site they want and make $4000-- enough money to be worth going to jail for theft over, if that's more than your annual income. Especially if they can argue to pay back the actual cost of the item, roughly $300 worth of parts.

It's breaking and entering, identity theft, and unauthorized access to a computer. Those crimes probably involve a longer amount of jail time, combined, than simple robbery.