News of the Week; November 26, 2014

GAMES

1. Activision Blizzard Settles With Shareholders Over Vivendi Stock Repurchase Plan

2. Activision using copyright notices to take down Call of Duty exploit videos: YouTubers may get infringement strikes for showing glitches and cheating methods.

3. FTC Hammers Sony For Misleading Advertising

4. Assassin’s Creed Unity Season Pass ‘discontinued’, free game offered: Ubisoft to offer free game to Season Pass holders, free DLC to everyone else following bumpy launch

5. ‘GamerGate’ and Gendered Hate Speech (Oxford Human Rights Hub)

+ Andrew Eisen Talks About Rating Sexism in Games Today on HuffPo Live

6. EA named one of the best places for LGBT equality

7. Boston Man Sentenced for Attempted Murder of UK Girlfriend He Met in ‘RuneScape’

8. Report: Several Counter-Strike: Go Pro Players Banned for Cheating

9. Far Cry 4 Publishers Messing With Pirates By Getting Them To Admit They Are Pirates

10. Valve lays out new rules and guidelines for Early Access developers: Game makers must communicate unfinished status clearly, not make promises for future.

11. App Store removes “Free” from game descriptions

12. Right of Publicity in Video Games – How You Can Legally Include a Celebrity in Your Game

13. Latest ‘World of Warcraft’ Expansion Puts Subscriber Numbers Up Over 10 Million

14. Call of Duty series tops $10 billion in revenue

15. Bohemian Killing Explores Our Muddy Legal Systems

16. How Video Games Are Exploring Our Fear of Police Militarization

17. YouTube Briefly Shuts Down Blizzard’s Own YouTube Channel For Copyright Infringement

18. Rebooting the Legacy of a Woman Who Made Video Games for Girls

19. Why modern music owes a big debt to Japanese video games

20. The ‘Freemium’ Model Is Brilliant, But It’s Ruining My Life

21. Indies, don’t sell shares in your company – Jon Hare

DIGITAL

22. ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Should Apply Worldwide, E.U. Panel Says

23. New Snowden docs: GCHQ’s ties to telco gave spies global surveillance reach: Access through “partners” such as Cable & Wireless pulls in gigabits globally.

24. Digital Privacy Is “The New Frontier Of Human Rights”

25. Censoring the Web Isn’t the Solution to Terrorism or Counterfeiting. It’s the Problem. (EFF)

26. Top NSA official raised alarm about metadata program in 2009: Source tells AP: such a data dragnet “crossed a line that had been sacrosanct.”

27. Note to future self: A bid to put encrypted data into a kind of time capsule gets a kick-start

+ BC exercise in idealism reopened old wounds: With a promise of secrecy, Boston College recorded for history the voices of The Troubles in Ireland. But, the promise now broken, the aftershocks in Belfast are testing a fragile peace.

+ Belfast police to sue for all Boston College tapes

28. New Internet Monitor Report: “The Tightening Web of Russian Internet Regulation”

29. Ireland Asks EU To Support Microsoft In Legal Battle Involving Competing Jurisdictions

30. New Documents Show Thousands of Unreported Wiretaps by Canadian Cops

31. The CIA’s Review Of Glenn Greenwald’s Snowden Book Is Hilarious

32. EFF Announces ‘Let’s Encrypt’

33. ISO 27018 – Data Protection Standards for the Cloud

34. How to Explain Net Neutrality to Your Relatives: A Thanksgiving Guide

35. T-Mobile accuses AT&T of lying about data roaming rates: AT&T facing complaints about what it charges competitors for roaming.

36. Fight Over Yahoo’s Use of Flickr Photos: Yahoo Starts Selling Canvas Prints From Free Pictures Uploaded to the Internet Sharing Site

37. Netflix, Facebook, Twitter Voice Support for Google in ‘Innocence of Muslims’ Case

38. Streaming TV site Aereo files for bankruptcy, will reorganize

39. Whitney Wolfe, Other Former Tinder Employees To Launch Direct Competitor Called Bumble

40. Your Backlash Against Sarah Lacy Is Misplaced: Resent the attention she’s getting? Uber singled HER out.

41. Algorithms Are Great and All, But They Can Also Ruin Lives

42. Is car technology creating stupid drivers?

CONSTRAINTS

43. The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

44. Voltaire on the Perils of Censorship, the Freedom of the Press, and the Rewards of Reading

45. Art, Activism, and CCTV: Notes from a talk at the Digital Media Conference in Boston 10/26/2013

46. Revenue Streams: Is Spotify the music industry’s friend or its foe?

+ Spotify Doesn’t Hurt Artists: My Band Would Be Nowhere Without It

47. Why Sony’s deal to collect royalties directly from SiriusXM could be terrible news for musicians

48. Making Authorship Thrive in the Digital Age

49. Virtual reality is journalism’s next frontier: Why newsrooms need to consider telling stories in a different way

50. Can An Algorithm Be Creative?

51. Mattel Pulls Sexist Barbie Book “I Can Be A Computer Engineer” Off Amazon

+ Dislike That Computer Engineer Barbie Book? This Tool Lets You Rewrite It

52. Smile, You’re Speaking EMOJI: The rapid evolution of a wordless tongue.

53. How should television be defined nowadays?

jon