Marked by panic selling and wet-your-pants fear, it was one of the worst weeks in the financial world’s history–a week that cut the legs out from under Google (GOOG), beat Yahoo until its market cap bled purple and caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to swing more than one thousand points on an intra-day basis.

It was a week that saw Sequoia Capital warn its portfolio companies to prepare for a protracted downturn or, in the words of partner Michael Moritz, be “spattered on windshields and radiator grills and be forgotten.” Turns out Bubble 2.0 sounds a lot like Bubble 1.0 when it pops.

Beneath the screams of agony echoing across Wall Street, there was other news worth noting:

• Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced plans to spin off its manufacturing operations.
• “Legal” turned out to be a poor choice of adjectives for RealNetworks’ RealDVD (RNWK), the company’s new “legal” DVD ripper. A judge extended the temporary restraining order barring the company from distributing it.
• This just in: Time Warner’s (TWX) AOL and Yahoo (YHOO) are still talking about a merger and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
  Where is Microsoft (MSFT) in all this? Sitting on the sidelines hoping the deal will go through.
• Finally, activist investor Eric Jackson, the creator of the Yahoo! Plan B investor community, revealed Yahoo! Plan C: his hedge fund’s divestiture of its Yahoo stake.

“RealNetworks took this legal action to protect consumers’ ability to exercise their fair-use rights for their purchased DVDs,” the company said in a statement. “We are disappointed that the movie industry is following in the footsteps of the music industry and trying to shut down advances in technology rather than embracing changes that provide consumers with more value and flexibility for their purchases. For nearly 15 years RealNetworks has created innovative products that are fully legal, great for consumers, and respectful of the legitimate interests of content creators and rights holders. RealDVD follows in that tradition. We expect to successfully defend our right to make RealDVD available to consumers and consumers’ rights to use it.”

We’ll see, I guess. Clearly the silly little “RealDVD is for saving a DVD you own” disclaimer attached to the software isn’t going to cut it with Hollywood. I imagine we’ll be hearing from the Motion Picture Association of America before the day is out.

Like other DVD rippers, the $30 software program easily copies entire DVDs–right down to the menus, bonus features and cover art. But unlike those rippers, RealDVD does so in an ostensibly legal way. It copies them without breaking their digital rights management schemes by installing a second layer of DRM on the ripped files that prevents users from sharing the DVDs online.

What it doesn’t do, though, is prohibit users from ripping DVDs that they rent. Effectively, users are on the honor system. And last I checked, the honor system isn’t a Hollywood-approved DRM scheme.