It depends on the time frame but the music industry has lost a fair number of digital masters that were kept on hard disk rather than digital tape. If I remember correctly the issue was heads sticking on drives that are left on a shelf for years but I could be wrong.
I guess it seemed like a good idea to scrap tape since the recordings in in question were direct digital recordings to disk. Analog tapes that are many years old can almost always be recovered at least long enough to make a duplicate. I've head stories about some pretty extraordinary steps being taken to recover damaged master tapes. Digital tape is a little more difficult but still much more recoverable.

Leroy said before the birth of Mahalia on December 1, his wife disapproved of his BlackBerry because he was always playing with it but now she has "changed her tune".

It would appear that Mayor Ravenstahl isn't familiar with the concept students (like tourists) bring money to his city and you really don't want them to leave. Cities fight to get tourist attractions to come to their city. Of course moving a university is harder than moving an amusement park so I guess it's safe to go after the university students. But if he makes it hard enough on the local universities and their students I'm sure they will find a way to express their displeasure and get rid of him.

The bad is that in the American legal system you sue whoever has the money. In this case that is Verizon.
The good is that maybe Verizon will think twice about keeping a psycho on their payroll. I think Verizon keeping this guy will show a court that they are not even attempting to weed out the bad actors on their payroll.
I figure the reality is that if this guy snapped once he will again. The next guy (or his relatives) will have a really good case when they sue Verizon. There will be no argument that this was an unforeseen probability.
I'm of the opinion that once an employee assaults a customer or another employee regardless of the circumstances, outside of self defense, he should be an ex-employee.

You know I might agree with you if Verizon had disciplined the employee but considering they are quoted in the article as saying he still works for them I am going to say maybe this is one of those suites that makes sense. I'd prefer to think any company that is going to send technicians to my house would have a no punching the customer "even if he really deserves it" policy but maybe that's just me. You can have the crazed employees in your house that get to punch the customer for something unreasonable like asking for ID which I would bet if you check Verizon's web site is even a suggested behavior when you have tech come out.

The fact the Verizon tech still has a job is interesting.
"In the months since this incident, his conduct has been blameless. As a result, we will not take further action," Young said.
The lesson here is if you work for Verizon you get to punch the customers as long as you only do it every now and then.

I'll start off with I think your assessment of copyright law may be incorrect but IANAL. I don't even play one on Slashdot so I'm going to skip over that part of your argument and look at the social/political issues. Ultimately I think that most things open source come down to social issues anyway. Everyone wants their credit.

Ultimately most of these BSD vs Linus and BSD license vs GPL licenses all seem to feel like religious debates so forgive me is I use a few religious analogies.

It seems to me the problem here is that the GPL and the BSD licenses are incompatible for some uses. So the a Linux developer convinced an OpenBSD developer to dual license his code. So far so good. The code is licensed BSD for ultimate freedom of use and GPL to allow its inclusion in the Linux kernel where it has to be GPLed. Then the Linux developer decides that his religion is correct and decides to quit giving any credit back to the original developer by removing the original copyright and license. That seems difficult to defend legally but let's assume that the BSD licenses actually allows this. (If so I'm sure Microsoft is pissed right about now that they included the BSD license in their products for all those years.) So what we come down to is a social issue. The original BSD developer has had his credit removed (something even nasty old Microsoft didn't do) so that someone in the GPL world wouldn't have to look at that ungodly BSD licenses. There isn't a practical reason for removing the BSD licenses so it has to be a social/political move.

What's the outcome of all this?

OpenBSD/Linux relations are strained a little further. With de Raadt and RMS in these camps that's probably inevitable anyway. Strong personalities create strong enemies.

I would guess getting BSD licensed software dual licensed just got harder since that seems to be the logic used to allowing this to be relicensed exclusively under the GPL. That's bad for everyone. Of course the retaliation will be a lack of code going back the other direction but I seem to get the feeling that getting a GPL developer to license under dual with BSD was probably already mode difficult than getting a BSD developer to license under dual with GPL. It's a big loss all the way around. About the only people who win are the proprietary software developers. At least in the Microsoft case they never seemed to have an issue with giving credit to BSD when it was required. Rejoice Microsoft wins again.