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On Thursday a German newspaper reported that Volkswagen Group "assumes it will have to buy back about 115,000 cars in the United States," according to Reuters.

Volkswagen officials have been working with US regulators to come to an agreement about how best to fix the nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles in the US that were discovered to illegally include software—generically called a defeat device—that thwarts the emissions control system. Defeat devices helped some of Volkswagen Group’s cars pass emissions tests in a lab, but allowed the cars to pollute more heavily when driving under normal conditions. In the 2.0-liter engine diesel cars especially, models were found to give off 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as is permitted by federal law.

The scandal eventually extended to Europe and then to global Volkswagen markets, with the company admitting that 11 million diesel passenger cars could have defeat devices on them. In Europe, at least, fixing the cheat was relatively easy for Volkswagen Group, with the approved fix taking under half an hour in most Volkswagen and Audi models.

Luckey offered no apologies for his appearance on the cover of Time this summer...

With this morning's revelation that the Oculus Rift VR headset would sell for $599, many potential customers and industry observers experienced some sticker shock. Where was the consumer unit "in the ballpark" of the $350 DK2 dev kit that Oculus founder CEO Palmer Luckey talked about as recently as October?

In a Reddit AMA interview tonight, Luckey apologized for that comment and for "assuming we had been clear enough about setting expectations" for the headset's price. "I handled the messaging poorly," Luckey said plainly in the AMA thread.

Defending the company to some extent, Luckey pointed to comments from last May, when Oculus executives started saying that the Oculus Rift and a capable PC would cost $1,500 combined (Oculus will indeed start selling pre-orders for the Rift bundled with "Oculus ready" PCs for that price in February). That should have set accurate expectations for most potential Rift owners, Luckey said. "For that vast majority of people, $1,500 is the all-in cost of owning Rift. The biggest portion of their cost is the PC, not the Rift itself."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2007 "dancing baby" case dates back to a takedown of a home video of a toddler. An appeals court ruled that content owners must consider fair use, but also suggested that takedown software would pass muster.

The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the law that allows content owners to remove copyrighted material from the Internet, and it's made just about no one happy. Content owners are bitter that their material tends to keep popping up, even when they've asked for it to be removed hundreds or even thousands of times. Internet platforms that host large amounts of user-generated content must cope with millions of infringement allegations, mass-produced by software. When those algorithms make mistakes, it's often users who pay the price—told they're copyright scofflaws because there was background music in their home video or they shared a photo of a toy they bought.

If you're feeling down about the DMCA this winter—or feeling just skippy about it—there's a government agency that wants to hear from you. On December 31, the US Copyright Office said it intends to take public comments about the effectiveness of the DMCA and its "safe harbor" provisions.

The comments will be part of a "public study to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the safe harbor provisions" of the DMCA. Questions that the office wants to consider include: