August 2014

News of the Week; August 27, 2014

GAMES

1. Capcom suing Koei Tecmo

2. Nintendo files copyright claims to have Super Smash Bros. leaks removed

3. Trolls drive Anita Sarkeesian out of her house to prove misogyny doesn’t exist

4. The Porn Viewing Habits of Console Owners

5. Report: Adult women gamers now double the number of under-18 boys

6. Rockstar: Lohan’s GTA suit is “for publicity purposes”

7. Police Called On Game Creator Over Nuclear War Diagrams

8. “We’re very close to having the first death in VR”

9. EA Cracking Down on ‘FIFA 15′ Cheaters

+ EA cracks down on FIFA virtual currency sales

10. Star Wars: Commander Is Slow-Going Unless You Pay Up

11. The dominance of ‘free’ App Store games, as seen in one handy chart

12. Indie devs facing “mass extinction event” – Prince

13. Amazon’s Twitch Acquisition Is Official

+ Google-Twitch deal nixed by antitrust concerns – Report

+ Why Amazon Really Bought Twitch

14. Third of PS4 owners switched from Wii or Xbox

15. Sony’s PlayStation Network Attacked: 9 Questions Answered

16. Atari “Destroyed” by Sale to Warner, Says Founder: Nolan Bushnell adds, “I think that Atari would still be important today if that sale hadn’t occured.”

17. Minecraft players build working hard drives: Players of the pixelated building block game have taken its virtual simulation tools to an unprecedented level – building functioning hard drives that can read and write data.

18. How Microsoft’s predictive modeling could make streaming gaming tolerable: “DeLorean” system reduces apparent lag by guessing what you’re about to do in-game.

19. Two fish are playing Street Fighter II and it is surprisingly entertaining

21. The ’80s Videogames That Built Castles From Words—And Changed My Life

22. Elite: the game that changed the world

23. Videogame Based On Borges Short Story Is In Fact Borgesian

24. The Bootleg Retro Console Culture Of Brazil

DIGITAL

25. Monkey’s selfie cannot be copyrighted, US regulators say: Selfie by macaca nigra monkey is public domain, not owned by nature photographer.

26. BC Court Rules on Signing Away Your Reasonable Expectation of Privacy

27. The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty (James Whitman, Yale Law School)

28. Is Technology Shifting Our Moral Compass?(Video)

29. How to Save the Net: Keep It Open (Vinton Cerf)

30. The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

31. Appeals court knocks out computer bingo patents

32. India makes ‘liking’ blasphemous content illegal

33. TiVo Releases A ‘Legal’ Version Of Aereo, Called Roamio, Proving That Aereo Really Was About Cable Length

34. Oregon Attorney General sues Oracle for “racketeering activity”: State claims Oracle hid problems with health exchange, conspired to overcharge.

35. China censorship filters are hamstringing posts that help their cause: Pro-government content gets caught as much as anti-government posts.

36. Why and How We Must Protect the Right to Film Cops in Ferguson

37, How AT&T’s Own Legal Fights Show It’s Lying In Claiming Broadband Reclassification Would Create Collateral Damage

38. Hackers Unmask Anonymous Posters On Secret, Including App’s Founder

39. The extreme, addictive side of fantasy football

CONSTRAINTS

40. The Conservatism of Emoji: Emoji offer you new possibilities for digital expression, but only if you’re speaking their language

41. Getty Images Sued Over Settlement Demand Letter: ‘Unfair, Deceptive Scheme,’ Copyright Lawyers Claim

42. Should Twitter, Facebook and Google Executives be the Arbiters of What We See and Read? (Glenn Greenwald)

43. A Horrifying Interactive Map of Global Internet Censorship

jon

News of the Week; August 20, 2014

GAMES

1. Nintendo Goes Copyright On Woman Making Pokemon-Inspired Planters

2. Arbiter Orders Bungie to Return Stock to Marty O’Donnell

3. Sony: PS4 success is “important for the shape of the whole industry”

4. Call of Duty’s three-year cycle gives devs “freedom to fail” – Hirshberg

5. Robin Williams and His Longtime Love of Videogames

+ Robin Williams to be Immortalized in World of Warcraft

6. Pro Gaming Faces a Surprising Challenge: Doping

7. MineORama Organizers Disappear

8. DARPA Uses Preteen Gamers to Beta Test Tomorrow’s Military Software

9. Creating Controversy: No, An Upcoming EA Game About Militarized Police Doesn’t Need To React To Ferguson, MO

10. Couple jailed for keeping two girls locked inside filthy trailer home for three years — while they played World of Warcraft:  The jobless California pair, 42, pleaded guilty to child abuse and false imprisonment for their actions against the two girls, 5 and 10.

11. Why clubs are using Football Manager as a real-life scouting tool: Sports data company Prozone is using stats from the computer game Football Manager to help real clubs recruit players

12. Devs want to work for Valve more than themselves – Survey

13. The Insidious Influence of Blockbuster Cinema on Videogames

DIGITAL

14. What Happens to #Ferguson Affects Ferguson: Net Neutrality, Algorithmic Filtering and Ferguson (by Zeynep Tufekci)

+ Free Speech, Filters, Algorithms & Net Neutrality: How Big Company Nudging Can Influence Your World View

+ SWAT Team Shows Up In Ferguson, Detains Reporters Live Tweeting Their Actions

+ In wake of Ferguson shooting, calls escalate for cops to wear body cams: Cameras serve as a “check against the abuse of power by police officers,” says ACLU.

+ #Ferguson Exposes the Fault Lines Between Facebook and Twitter

15. These six lawsuits shaped the internet

16. The Internet’s Original Sin: It’s not too late to ditch the ad-based business model and build a better web (by Ethan Zuckerman)

17. A Magna Carta for the web (Tim Berners-Lee)

18. Everyone Knows Privacy Is About Power. Now What?(by Ryan Calo)

19. Brazil court to Apple, Google: Wipe anonymous sharing app off users’ phones: New app called Secret is forbidden by the Brazilian constitution, judge says

20. Delaware Passes Law to Give Heirs Rights to Digital Property

21. Data Analysis Of FCC Comments Reveals Almost No Anti-Net Neutrality Comments

+ Can We Kill This Ridiculous Shill-Spread Myth That CDNs Violate Net Neutrality? They Don’t

+ Comcast, TWC pull $132,000 donation from event honoring FCC commissioner: Controversial donations will be redirected toward group promoting diversity.

22. Apple investor sues execs over illegal poaching deals, cites Jobs as “walking antitrust violation”

23. Canada Completes Ratification of International Treaties on Copyright

24. U.S. Court Grants Order To Wipe Pirate Sites From The Internet

+ Who Needs SOPA? US Court Wipes Sites From The Internet For ‘Infringement’ Without Even Alerting Sites In Question

25. OnePlus Cancels Its Dumb Contest Following Uproars Of Sexism

26. Twitter Pollutes The Timeline

27. Ask’s CEO: “We won’t run a bullying site. If we can’t fix Ask.fm, we’ll shut it down”

28. Mark Zuckerberg Dumps Ice On Himself For ALS Awareness, Passes The Challenge Onto Bill Gates

29. 49ers’ ubiquitous stadium Wi-Fi network delivers to full house in NFL debut

CONSTRAINTS

30. Warner Bros. Wins Appeal Over Fictional Technology in ‘Dark Knight Rises’

31. 10 years of podcasting: Code, comedy, and patent lawsuits: “Thank you very much for taking the time to download this MP3 file.”

+ The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Adam Carolla’s Settlement with the Podcasting Troll

32. Arrest over Twitter parody of mayor wasn’t “unreasonable,” Peoria says: “We took every step in accordance with the law,” city’s attorney says.

33. Licensing Boards Think Studying For A Test Is Copyright Infringement, Forbid Memorization Of Material

34. Huge Tournament Celebrates End of Oakland’s Bizarre 80-Year Pinball Ban

jon

News of the Week; August 13, 2014

GAMES

1. SNK Playmore Files Criminal Complaint Against Square Enix

2. Sony faces Killzone: Shadowfall lawsuit over graphics – “Sony’s marketing and on-box representations turned out to be nothing more than fiction”

3. Big Fish accused of “unfair or deceptive” trade practices

4. Codemasters offers refunds for PC port of mobile Colin McRae

5. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood And The Viral “Oops”

6. Twitch Muting Video That Contains Copyrighted Audio

+ Twitch Adds Appeal Button to Videos Affected By Automated Copyright Enforcement System

+ Twitch Muting Further Demonstrates Copyright Law Needs To Relax For Its Own Good

+ Andrew Eisen Video: Twitch Does Not Need To Mute Sound in Videos

7. Candy Crush Saga publisher King getting pummeled by market after weak Q2

8. World of Warcraft Loses 800K Subscribers in the Last Three Months

9. Zynga misses Wall Street expectations, but it invests in NFL and Tiger Woods games for the ‘long term’

+ Zynga chief Don Mattrick steers the struggling social game publisher into a mobile future (interview)

10. Take-Two loses $35.4 million in first quarter

11. Father Takes Sons to the Middle East to Show Them the Difference Between Real War and Video Game War

12. Rutgers players upset about end of college football video game series

13. Gaza: The Videogame – Games in the Google Play App Store let you play the Gaza conflict. Why do their developers create them?

14. Activision Teases the Return of Sierra

+ Activision resurrects Sierra thanks to good trademark practices (Jas Purewal)

15. PlayStation 4 will let you play friends’ games without buying them this fall

16. PlayStation 4 hits 10m sales mark

17. Xbox One Getting Mobile TV Streaming, Plus DLNA And USB Playback

18. Why Game Accessibility Matters

19. Playing Games Increases Brain Size

20. Brains At Play

21. An actual fish has been playing Pokémon Red for 135 hours now: We can’t cure ebola, but we can make it so a fish can play Game Boy games!

22. Games Studies: the international journal of computer game research (volume 14 issue 1August 2014 ISSN:1604-7982)

DIGITAL

23. Monkey’s selfie at center of copyright brouhaha: Wikipedia says the public, not the photojournalist, owns the rights to ape’s pic.

+ Wikipedia’s monkey selfie ruling is a travesty for the world’s monkey artists: How is an aspiring monkey photographer supposed to make it if she can’t stop the rampant internet piracy of monkey works?

+ How That Monkey Selfie Reveals The Dangerous Belief That Every Bit Of Culture Must Be ‘Owned’

+ We Asked A Bunch Of Lawyers: Who Owns The Copyright To This Amazing Monkey Selfie?: Wikipedia? The Wildlife Photographer? Maybe Even The Monkey?

24. Plot Thickens as 900 Writers Battle Amazon

+ Amazon Gets Increasingly Nervous

+ In a Fight With Authors, Amazon Cites Orwell, but Not Quite Correctly

+ Distribution Is King

25. Consent agreement reached with e-book publishers – Canada has reached a settlement with e-book publishers following settlements in the EU and the US

26. The Internet Never Forgets: Google Inc.’S “Right To Be Forgotten” EU Ruling And Its Implications In Canada

27. Judge Rejects Comically Low $324.5M Settlement To Tech Workers Who Were Cheated Out Of Fair Wages

28. DMCA mea culpa: Randy Queen apologizes for response to criticism – Artist of Darkchylde series says his response “was the wrong one to take.”

29. The Ghost of iCraveTV?: The CRTC Asks Bell For Answers About Its Mobile TV Service in Net Neutrality Case

30. Apple and Samsung Agree To Drop All Patent Lawsuits Outside the U.S.

31. President Obama Does Not Support Internet ‘Fast Lanes’

+ FCC Chairman Lines Up With President Obama on Fast Lanes

32. Snapchat Is Now The #3 Social App Among Millennials

33. Could Red Bull Become the New ESPN?

34. Foursquare kills off the “social media” pretense of data collection

35. More than 20,000 join privacy action against Facebook: Lawsuit initiated by Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems over data protection

36. A More Pseudonymous Internet: From ephemeral publishing apps to the abandoned Google+ “real names” policy, a push to revive relative namelessness online.

37. Quarantine for Cyberbullies: The Latest Strategy in the Fight Against Offensive Social Media Content

38. Who has better online privacy? The U.S. or EU?

39. How a Simple Spambot Became the Second Most Powerful Member of an Italian Social Network

CONSTRAINTS

40. Allergy to Originality: Mark Twain and the Remix Nature of All Creative Work, Animated

41. Reagan Biographer Claims ‘Copyright Infringement’ Because Another Biographer Used The Same Facts

42. Do documentary filmmakers need data about their audiences?: As Netflix and other services gain viewer insights, filmmakers aren’t seeing the full picture

43. Netflix surpasses HBO in subscriber revenue: New media out earns old—with a smaller customer base.

44. NJ Supreme Court Says Rap Lyrics Can’t Be Introduced As Evidence Unless Directly Linked To Criminal Actions

jon

News of the Week; August 6, 2014

GAMES

1. Artist claims she invented Angry Birds, files complaint seeking compensation

2. Thailand’s military junta bans dictator-simulator Tropico 5: State reportedly worried game “might affect peace and order” in the country.

3. Gearbox responds to Aliens class-action lawsuit, throws Sega under bus: Says dev spent “millions” of its own to finish game, never repaid by Sega.

4. Of Doom Metal, Women, And Videogames

5. Shock study: Kids playing video games over an hour a day are better adjusted

6. Study: Play of ‘Risk-Glorifying’ Video Games Can Exacerbate Deviant Behavior

7. Bomb Gaza pulled from Google Play

8. Hacker crack squad hitting the video game industry with IP-stealing attacks (concerns theft of “source code”)

9. More than 20 million people watched the most lucrative video game tournament ever

10. The Case For and Against Game Subscriptions in the App Store

11. Strong PlayStation 4 sales keep Sony in the black

12. Metal Gear Solid on PS4 triples Xbox One version sales

13. PS4, Xbox One doubling last gen sales – NPD Canada

14. China’s Xbox One and games will be totally region locked

15. Sony And EA Experiment With New Business Models For Older Games

16. A Father’s Struggle To Make A Game After Cancer Killed His Son

DIGITAL

17. OTW files amicus brief in Capitol Records vs Vimeo

18. Tweeting from courtroom impresses Nova Scotia top judge: Chief Justice Joseph Kennedy of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court allowed reporters use Twitter during a sexual assault trial and says he “couldn’t get over how well it had worked.”

19. Copyright Office Rejected My Attempt To Copyright A Tweet

20. The death of privacy: Google knows what you’re looking for. Facebook knows what you like. Sharing is the norm, and secrecy is out. But what is the psychological and cultural fallout from the end of privacy?

21. What Is Privacy?: It’s also not so simple… (danah boyd)

22. Privacy and Data Security Harms

23. Bullying Is A Problem For All Of Us, And The App Secret Needs To Do Something To Prevent It

24. Max Mosley Continues His Quixotic And Misguided Quest: Sues Google For Still Finding Photos He Doesn’t Like

25. Leak Lets You Send Anonymous Emails

26. The NFL Announces It’s Tracking RFID Chips On Every Player For 2014

27. Elon Musk says artificial intelligence is ‘potentially more dangerous than nukes’

28. Chinese Communist Party-Backed Tech Giants Bring Censorship To The Global Stage

29. New Russian law represses social media, bloggers: Activists say law is part of “Russia’s relentless crackdown on free expression.”

30. How Silicon Valley wants to hack North Korea: Balloons, slingshots, and miniature radios could get information to ‘the darkest corner of earth’

31. Dear America, Would You Please Give Edward Snowden His Medal Of Freedom Already?

32. Twitter Pushing DOJ, FBI To Let It Disclose More Info on National Security Requests

33. In the age of Reddit, can the Internet ever really grow up?

34. CRTC Finds Rogers Engaged in Unjust Discrimination With Its Domestic Roaming Agreements

35. FCC chair accuses Verizon of throttling unlimited data to boost profits

+ Verizon to FCC: We Throttle Unlimited Data Users to Incentivize Using Less Data

36. MLB Comes Out Against FCC’s ‘Fast Lanes’ Plan

37. Quantifying Comcast’s Monopoly Power

38. Adam Carolla Won’t Let Company Drop Podcast Patent Infringement Case Against Him

39. EFF inaugurates “Stupid Patent of the Month”: Your August candidate – patent for “a doctor’s computer-secretary.”

40. Microsoft sues Samsung over Android patent fees

CONSTRAINTS

41. The Ambush at Sheridan Springs: How Gary Gygax Lost Control of Dungeons & Dragons

42. How Art Became Advertising

43. Recording Industry Willfully Misreads The Law In Order To Sue Ford & GM For Having Built-in CD Rippers

44. Artist uses DMCA to remove criticism of his impossibly-shaped female characters:

45. Randy Queen takes issue with Tumblr posts using images from his Darkchylde series.

46. Amid backlash, hotel rescinds $500 fines for “negative” online reviews: News of the policy hit the Internet, and the Internet reacted predictably.

47. How one man’s lies almost destroyed the comics industry

jon