The device was discovered by authorities near the cockpit of Southwest Airlines Flight 157 after arriving from Kansas City shortly before 4PM on Sunday.

The TSA evacuated gates 3 through 15 as a precautionary measurement against the “deadly” science project. In all, 11 people were detained in connection with the device. The incident caused ongoing flight delays at the Dallas airport, including three that had to be diverted.

As expected, Eurocrats are anxious to probe the mega-merger of Universal EMI, fearing the effect on digital music markets.

Unnamed sources at Universal have briefed journalists that the competitive threat of digital piracy means consolidation should be permitted. Critics have pointed out that the merged entity's 40+ per cent market share would make it the king-maker for digital music services – and that no service would then survive without Universal's catalogue.

Stephen Fry has confirmed he and Sir Ian McKellen will pay a copyright licence fee so a Southampton pub can carry on trading as The Hobbit.

The pub was threatened with legal action by Hollywood film firm the Saul Zaentz Company (SZC) which accused it of copyright infringement.

Sir Ian, who plays Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings films, described the film company's actions as "unnecessary pettiness" and Fry said it was "self-defeating bullying".

“Our industries do something that no one else can do,” the Motion Picture Association of America’s Fritz Attaway said at the Association of American Publishers annual meeting this morning. “We create content that people want to have.”

“Education is key,” Attaway said. “It is absolutely ridiculous that a movie that cost $100 million to create, a copy of which you paid $20 for, to say that you own that movie and should make any number of copies you want to.”

While the major music companies’ revenue from music sales has gone down, they have a brand new increasing income stream: revenue generated from the sale of other people’s music. In the past five years, hundreds of millions of dollars of songwriter royalties have been generated and never paid to the songwriter, or have been given to Warner Bros, EMI, Universal, Sony and others based on their market share- estimates put this new income at over half a billion dollars.

This infringement and lack of payment is one of the biggest outrages of the music industry and yet it is rarely talked about and even more rarely understood.

The head of Warner Home Entertainment Group thinks that an easy, safe way to convert movies you already own on DVD to other digital formats is to take your DVDs, find a store that will perform this service, drive to that store, find the clerk who knows how to perform the service, hope that the “DVD conversion machine” is not broken, stand there like a chump while the clerk “safely” converts your movie to a digital file that may only play on studio-approved devices, drive home, and hope everything worked out. Oh, and the good news is that you would only need to pay a reasonable (per-DVD?) price for this pleasure.

Try to picture the real alternative to this hokum – people making their own copies of their movies at home.

Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has threatened to pull out of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) over a film rating given to the documentary Bully.

The R rating means children under the age of 17 will not be able to watch the film, about bullying in US schools, without a parent present.

In a statement, MPAA appeal board chairman Joan Graves said the rating was not a comment on the film's subject matter but was imposed for "some language".

Katy Perry had a huge year. She went No.1 five times. She was the most played artist on the radio.

Here's what Katy Perry sold in the United States: 2 million albums and 24 million digital tracks. That's not a lot of albums. That is a LOT of songs. At a dollar a pop.

By my estimate, the record-shattering, chart-topping Katy Perry made her label around $8 million in U.S. music sales.

This year, Public Knowledge requested an exemption that would allow people to copy movies they own on DVD onto other devices. On Friday, the MPAA submitted its comments to our request.

In the comments, the MPAA said that it was “a mere inconvenience” that people who paid for a movie on DVD cannot transfer that movie to another device. Furthermore, the MPAA insisted that no DMCA exemption was necessary because people who want to watch their movies on the go have other options. What options? Pay them more money, of course.

But instead of reverence in the wake of Houston’s passing, Sony chose to raise the price of one of her most popular hits collections. The Ultimate Collection album in the U.K. jumped in price by more than 60 percent from £4.99 to £7.99 within 30 minutes of Houston’s death, according to Digital Spy.

Sony Music and Apple did not immediately respond to queries about the price hike.