News of the Week; December 31, 2014

GAMES

1. Hackers Take Credit For PlayStation Network And Xbox Live Outages On Christmas

+ Sony PlayStation network down for 3rd straight day: Sony won’t say how many of the networks 56 million users are affected

+ FBI Investigating Christmas Day Attacks on PSN, Xbox Live

2. Sony in the Killzone: case over resolution continues (Rebecca Tushnet)

3. UK Party Leader Attacks Satirical Mobile Game Made By Teenagers Interested In Politics

4. High court justice still unsure about violent video game ruling

5. Hatred’ Gets Approved on Steam Greenlight

6. The year of GamerGate: The worst of gaming culture gets a movement

7. EA’s Latest Attempt To Destroy SimCity Franchise: Micropayments For Hammers And Nails And Supplies

8. Why 1993 was the Best Year in Gaming

9. 2014 in review: the year women characters ruled

10. Almost every single Xbox executive we profiled in this video last year has left the company: Told you TV was a bad idea

DIGITAL

11. How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm (Cory Doctorow)

12. How Copyright Makes Culture Disappear

13. Suit over Facebook’s practice of scanning users’ messages to go forward: Company’s TOS “does not establish that users consented” to the practice, court rules.

+ Facebook May be On the Hook for Scanning Private Messages for Links

14. Facebook apologizes for morbid results with its “Year in Review” nag: Complaining user was auto-served a photo of a recently deceased loved one.

15. Who Is Watching You?: Companies and institutions track us almost indiscriminately. Is this the world we want to live in?

16. Peter Gabriel: Tech Can Make Video Evidence a Cornerstone of Justice

17. Male Nerds Think They’re Victims Because They Have No Clue What Female Nerds Go Through

18. Ireland: US courts need our permission to view emails stored on Dublin server

19. How Twitter, Google And Facebook Have Responded To Russia’s Attempt To Censor Political Opposition

20. NSA Does Document Dump on Christmas Eve

+ U.S. Spy Agency Reports Improper Surveillance of Americans

21. Prying Eyes: Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security

22. The Geopolitics of Cyberspace After Snowden (Ron Deibert)

23. Turkish Government Takes Further Action Against Freedom of Speech

24. The Great Firewall keeps growing, as China blocks all Gmail access: Chinese web-blocking has grown significantly in 2014.

25. India’s Government Asks ISPs To Block GitHub, Vimeo And 30 Other Websites

26. We Spoke To A North Korean Defector Who Trained With Its Hackers — What He Said Is Pretty Scary

+ Why Sony is way out on a limb with legal threats against Twitter

+ The Interview was pirated more than 750,000 times in its first day of release

+ What Would Twitter Do? Musician’s tweets of Sony e-mails lead to threats: “I don’t know what the line is,” says musician-turned-publisher Val Broeksmit.

+ North Korea suffers another Internet outage, hurls racial slur at Pres. Obama: Latest drama follows The Interview’s Christmas opening—which earned $1 million.

+ Who’s Behind The Internet Outages In North Korea, Anyway?

+ The Interview earns a stunning $15M from online sales: Sony got close to the $20 million weekend it was aiming for.

+ How ‘The Interview’s’ VOD grosses could change the game

+ Sony’s Own Copyright Infringement Shows How Broken Our Copyright System Is Today

+ North Korean defector to airdrop DVD, USB copies of The Interview: DPRK’s “leadership will crumble if the idolization of leader Kim breaks down.”

27. Amazon Offers All-You-Can-Eat Books. Authors Turn Up Noses.

28. United And Orbitz Sue “Hidden Cities” Flight Search Engine Skiplagged

29. Forum selection clause in browsewrap agreement did not bind parties in bitcoin fraud case

30. Big Media Sees Digital Competitors Bearing Down In 2015

31. The Letters of the Law: 2014 in Tech Law and Policy (Michael Geist)

32. International Copyright Law: 2014 in Review (EFF)

33. 2014 – The Copyright Year (The 1709 Blog)

34. Top five shifts in Internet law in 2014

35. Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In 

CONSTRAINTS

36. The Messy Minds of Creative People

37. Azealia Banks, Iggy Azalea and hip-hop’s appropriation problem: Jeff Chang offers rhyme and reason on the rap beef between the two pop stars that sheds light on the genre’s complex relationship with race and identity

38. How Copyright Forced A Filmmaker To Rewrite Martin Luther King’s Historic Words

39. Our Reply To A Totally Bogus Monkey Selfie Cease & Desist

40. In Hollywood, It’s a Men’s, Men’s, Men’s World

41. Hollywood’s Top 10 Legal Disputes of 2014

42. Biggest stories of 2014 didn’t need traditional news outlets

jon