News of the Week; April 5, 2017

By Jon Festinger on April 19, 2017

GAMES

  1. Blizzard awarded $8.5M in damages following copyright infringement lawsuit
  2. Blizzard awarded $8.6m in Bossland lawsuit: German cheatbot company failed to appear in court, ordered to halt sale of Blizzard related products in the US
  3. Nintendo v. King: Answering Questions, and Raising New Ones, About Technological Protection Measures
  4. UK ad authority rules against Liberators dev for misleading images in ads
  5. ASA Ruling on Mutant Box Interactive Ltd
  6. ASA bans Mobile Strike ad for objectifying women: Machine Zone’s latest YouTube video shows women playing the game by the pool in bikinis
  7. ASA Ruling on Machine Zone Inc
  8. How do you deal with CS:GO gambling? Legitimize it: Faceit’s ECS league partners with Genius Sports to provide data to regulated bookmakers.
  9. HTC: There will be no escaping ads in VR, either – Gaze-based technology “can also track whether the users have viewed them.”
  10. HTC introduces eye-tracking VR ads: It can track when players look away to judge ad effectiveness
  11. CCP CEO: “I would call the VR installed base huge” – CCP’s Hilmar Pétursson explains how the EVE developer got into sports with Sparc and why the VR space isn’t as tough as some might think
  12. Sony looking for new markets for PSVR
  13. Sony going commercial with PlayStation VR after making slow progress with consumers
  14. 1-in-4 VR pros say biz growth disappointed in 2016 – Survey: 26% expected more from their VR business last year, but 46% of respondents said they saw strong or very strong growth
  15. Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey Out at Facebook
  16. Palmer Luckey to leave Facebook: Company declined to say if Oculus co-founder is leaving voluntarily
  17. BioWare devs respond to Andromeda criticism with ambitious patch plan
  18. Bioware Apologizes For How It Handled Mass Effect: Andromeda’s Transgender Character
  19. Struggling peripheral maker Mad Catz files for bankruptcy
  20. Mad Catz enters bankruptcy: Peripheral company halts operations as it enters liquidation process
  21. Nintendo’s soul-searching on F2P: Super Mario Run was a bold experiment in mobile business models – but the company may not have realised the enormity of the task it was undertaking
  22. Mobile game spend will double to $105 billion by 2021: App Annie’s forecast shows massive gains for games over five years, with China representing 41% of all spending on mobile apps
  23. Activision plans many years of ‘Marvel-esque’ film/TV based on game IP
  24. Would you consider a disc-free console option?: Some gamers may be ready to ditch the disc drive to save on hardware.
  25. BAFTA-winning Brenda Romero: “We need to expand the range of voices making games”: Long-running games designer advocates teaching kids to code, broadening the scope of development and learning from board games
  26. Women In Games launches Ambassador programme: New initiative designed to double the number of women working in games over 10 years
  27. Why depicting gruesome historical moments in games can be a tough call
  28. 16 years later, Blizzard is still patching Diablo II: New update helps the game run on modern operating systems
  29. Two-fifths of gaming firms ‘could relocate over Brexit’
  30. Devs Answer: What are the best ways to trick players?
  31. Indie Games Scene – 2017 Overview
  32. Historians aim to recover, restore, and archive video game media assets

DIGITAL

  1. Use Of VPNs Banned Completely For Millions Of People By Chinese Authorities
  2. New Regulations Appear To Authorize Chinese Law Enforcement To Hack Into Computers Anywhere In The World
  3. A Pic Of Putin In Makeup Is Now ‘Extremist’ Material: Disseminating the image could lead to a fine and even jail time, but some Russians don’t care
  4. Where Speech Goes, Repression Follows: The Global Trend of Criminalizing Online Speech
  5. Social media firms faces huge hate speech fines in Germany
  6. How YouTube Can Fix Its White Nationalism and Anti-Semitism Problem: The Google-run video giant is losing advertisers due to its inability to police its own content. Here’s how it can turn things around.
  7. Netizen Report: India Had 31 Internet Shutdowns in 2016. How Many Did Your Country Have? – The quiet cost of regional Internet shutdowns in India, China and beyond.
  8. Here’s Why Facebook and Google Can’t Fix the Fake News Problem
  9. Study: Fake election news flooded Mich. Twitter feeds
  10. Lawyers win again in latest privacy class-action settlement: iOS address book deal, if split evenly among class members, pays 53 cents each.
  11. German Court Rules Parents Must Out Their Family Members For Copyright Trolls Or Pay Fines Themselves
  12. Microsoft sued for millions over Windows 10 upgrades: Class action accuses operating system of causing hard drive failures and other problems.
  13. 8,000 aspiring Uber and Lyft drivers fail state background check
  14. Uber exec accused of stealing IP from Google made $120M, but worked on the side: Google hammers on Levandowski, who remains in charge of Uber’s self-driving cars.
  15. Judge orders Uber to search servers, work harder to find Waymo’s 14,000 files: “In 42 years, I’ve never seen a record this strong. You are up against it.”
  16. YouTube TV goes live today in five US cities, gears up to add more networks: AMC, BBC World News, Sundance TV, and more to come at no extra cost.
  17. Top 100 Most Subscribed YouTube Channels Worldwide • February 2017
  18. ASA orders takedown of Instagrammer’s post for not having #ad: A promotional post by Instagrammer Sheikhbeauty for the brand Flat Tummy Tea failed to comply with CAP rulings as it lacked any disclosure that the post was an ad.
  19. IoT garage door opener maker bricks customer’s product after bad review: Startup tells customer “Your unit will be denied server connection.”
  20. You Can Now Beg for Money on Facebook
  21. Facebook plans a free version of its Slack competitor 
  22. Spotify finally lets artists restrict new albums to premium subscribers: Plus Kanye West is the first artist to have an album go Platinum on streams alone.
  23. Amazon – Not Twitter – To Stream Thursday Night NFL Games As League Is ‘Expanding Reach’
  24. Amazon outbids Twitter for rights to livestream Thursday Night Football games
  25. But you must be a Prime member to watch.
  26. Amazon agrees to refund up to $70 million worth of in-app purchases made by kids
  27. Amazon’s Kodi Box Ban And Copyright Liability For Device Distributors
  28. Kim Dotcom’s Canadian connection: Servers in Ontario could be key in case against alleged Internet pirate
  29. A kitten becomes Exhibit 41 in defamation suit against Buzzfeed over Trump dossier: “Six ways Buzzfeed has misled the court… and a picture of a kitten.”
  30. Bad Copyright Laws Are Creating Junky, Biased AI: Machine learning systems need lots of data to overcome bias — but copyright limits their menu
  31. Can AI Ever Be as Curious as Humans?
  32. A.I. Versus M.D.: What happens when diagnosis is automated?
  33. Hologram Calls Could Be The Future FaceTime: Verizon and Korean Telecom held the first international live 5G hologram chat
  34. Within the Next Decade, You Could Be Living in a Post-Smartphone World
  35. Golden State Warriors, Philips Lighting Bring Oracle Arena Experience Inside Fans’ Homes
  36. Brazil Proposes New Digital Copyright Rules for the WTO
  37. Attention Markets & the Law (Tim Wu)

CREATIVITY

  1. Jeff Koons Parody Defense Fails in French Copyright Infringement Case
  2. Horizon Comics Productions, Inc. v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC
  3. 5 Pointz Graffiti Artists’ Major Win in Suit against Developers, Explained
  4. If you publish Georgia’s state laws, you’ll get sued for copyright and lose: In some states, you can’t read the law without paying a corporation.
  5. Newly Leaked Documents Expose Stunning Waste And Incompetence At The Copyright Office
  6. Another Major Scandal At The Copyright Office: $25 Million ‘Fake Budget’ Line Item
  7. How to make Millennials hate you, The Pepsi Way.
  8. Pepsi Pulls Controversial Kendall Jenner Ad Following Twitter Uproar
  9. How Pepsi Got It So Wrong: Unpacking One of the Most Reviled Ads in Recent Memory: Experts weigh in on the soda-maker’s tone-deaf debacle
  10. Pepsi’s New Ad Is a Total Success: Every feature of the “Jump In” ad benefits the company—even the act of pulling it from the airwaves.
  11. Moral Rights in America: “the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself”
  12. Myths and Legends of Copyright Reform: A New Hope
  13. Bleistein, the Problem of Aesthetic Progress, and the Making of American Copyright Law (Barton Beebe)
  14. The Terminator Comes to Hollywood to Destroy Old Copyright Grants
  15. Canadian Copyright: Year in Review 2016
  16. Deciphering the U.S. NAFTA Digital Demands, Part One: Intellectual Property (Michael Geist)
  17. The Relative Virtues of Bottom-Up and TopDown Theories of Fair Use (Pamela Samuelson)
  18. Monster Energy Attempts To Run From Laughable Trademark Spat It Started With Thunder Beast Root Beer
  19. Brewery Looks To Reform Trademark Practices After Its Lawyers Bully A Pub Over Its Name
  20. Brexit: what might change Intellectual Property
  21. Law review article ‘Defining Hate Speech’ attempts the impossible
  22. Did Reddit’s April Fool’s gag solve the issue of online hate speech?: Nations battled, voids came and went, and one million pixels said a lot about humanity.
  23. The Platform Press: How Silicon Valley reengineered journalism (Emily Bell & Taylor Owen) 

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

  1. Net Neutrality Is Trump’s Next Target, Administration Says
  2. Ajit Pai says broadband market too competitive for strict privacy rules: FCC Chair ignores lack of home Internet competition in argument against privacy rules.
  3. FCC, FTC Bosses Pen Misleading Editorial Falsely Claiming The Best Way To Protect Your Privacy Moving Forward… Is To Gut Net Neutrality
  4. FCC Boss Takes Aim At Efforts To Bring Broadband To The Poor
  5. Fox serves up a fetid reminder that when you’re a star, you can still do anything
  6. Free Market Does What The Court System Could Not: Hurt Bill O’Reilly – This is the PR debacle that pulled the advertiser’s dollars.
  7. Understanding the Role of the BBC as a Provider of Public Infrastructure (Brett Frischmann)
  8. Tweeting #Justice: Audio-Visual Coverage Of Court Proceedings In A World Of Shifting Technology (Itay Ravid)

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

  1. Canadian Appeals Court Says Vice Media Must Turn Over Communications With Source To Law Enforcement
  2. RCMP reveals use of secretive cellphone surveillance technology for the first time: After CBC investigation into suspicious signals in Ottawa, police offer new insight into their own tactics
  3. Taser stuns law enforcement world, offers free body cameras to all US police: Company also changes name to Axon to reflect its primary body-camera product.
  4. Why Warrantless Access to Internet Subscriber Information is Back on the Legislative Agenda (Michael Geist)
  5. Snoops may soon be able to buy your browsing history. Thank the US Congress: Not only did they vote to violate your privacy for their own profit – they are seeking to make it illegal for a key watchdog to protect your privacy online (Bruce Schneier)
  6. Want to Stop Your Internet Provider From Selling Your Browsing Data? It Ain’t Easy
  7. President Trump delivers final blow to Web browsing privacy rules: ISP privacy rules are dead as Trump signs repeal instead of issuing veto.
  8. Trump move to kill privacy rules opposed by 72% of Republicans, survey says: Privacy is partisan for lawmakers, but not necessarily for the rest of us.
  9. Trump’s Internet Brigades Shocked To Realize The Government Just Sold Them Out On Privacy
  10. After vote to kill privacy rules, users try to “pollute” their Web history: “ISP Data Pollution” fills browsing history with noise to protect your privacy.
  11. Tim Berners-Lee: selling private citizens’ browsing data is ‘disgusting’
  12. The NYPD Posed as Black Lives Matter Protesters and Spied on Their Text Messages
  13. Samsung’s Tizen is riddled with security flaws, amateurishly written: Researcher calls it the “worst code [he’s] ever seen.”
  14. ISP privacy rules could be resurrected by states, starting in Minnesota: Minnesota could prevent ISPs from collecting personal data without consent.
  15. Comcast Paid Civil Rights Groups To Support Killing Broadband Privacy Rules
  16. AT&T, Comcast & Verizon Pretend They Didn’t Just Pay Congress To Sell You Out On Privacy
  17. Comcast: We won’t sell browser history, and you can opt out of targeted ads
  18. Congress’s vote to eviscerate Internet privacy could give the FBI massive power
  19. Russia’s hack of State Department was “hand-to-hand” combat: State-sponsored hackers are going increasingly brazen and confrontational.
  20. Wikileaks releases code that could unmask CIA hacking operations: “Marble” libraries include code used to obfuscate—and unscramble— CIA malware.
  21. DOJ Refuses FOIA Request On Emails, Claiming ‘Personal Privacy’
  22. Oversight Committee Finds FBI’s Facial Recognition Database Still Filled With Innocent People, Still Wrong 15% Of The Time
  23. FBI Arrests Creator Of Remote Access Tool, Rather Than Those Abusing It To Commit Crime
  24. How A Little Metadata Made It Possible To Find FBI Director James Comey’s Secret Twitter Account
  25. Smart TV hack embeds attack code into broadcast signal—no access required: Demo exploit is inexpensive, remote, scalable—and opens door to more advanced hacks.
  26. Pennsylvania Court Says Bloggers Protected By Journalist Shield Law; Don’t Have To Reveal Commenter IP Addresses
  27. If A Phone’s Facial Recognition Security Can Be Defeated By A Picture Of A Face, What Good Is It?
  28. Canadian Prosecutors Cut Loose 35 Mafia Suspects Rather Than Turn Over Info On Stingray Devices
  29. Microsoft opens up on Windows telemetry, tells us most of what data it collects: Windows telemetry is getting a lot more transparent.
  30. Privacy, Poverty And Big Data: A Matrix Of Vulnerabilities For Poor Americans (Mary Madden, Michele Gilman, Karen Levy & Alice Marwick)

Jon

 

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