News of the Week; September 21, 2016

GAMES

1. McRO, INc. v. Bandai Namco Games America: Federal Circuit Revives Software Patents Held Ineligible
2. Two YouTubers charged with promoting FIFA game gambling site to minors
3. YouTube star charged over ‘FIFA’ game betting: He and another video producer allegedly broke UK law by promoting video game bets.
4. Steam pulls Digital Homicide games following fan lawsuit: Indie studio alleged harassment in $18m lawsuit against Steam users, now considering legal action against Valve for its response
5. Valve bans developer from Steam after it sues customers over bad reviews: Digital Homicide’s games removed by Valve for being “hostile” to users.
6. Dev gets removed from Steam after filing a lawsuit against Steam users
7. Valve relents on Steam key reviews – well, almost: Individual reviews from non-Steam purchases will be more visible, but they are still excluded from overall score
8. Curt Schilling and others aim to exit 38 Studios lawsuit by paying $2.5M settlement
9. Jagex punishing banned Runescape players by selling their stuff
10. Dark Side of the Sun
11. Nintendo raises the banner for premium mobile gaming: A latecomer to a battle that was lost some time ago, Nintendo is choosing to champion premium games on mobile over the ubiquitous F2P model
12. Pokémon Go player is mugged live on his Twitch stream
13. Pokémon Go player assaulted in Central Park while streaming on Twitch: “Still talking to police and will go to hospital soon. My jaw is a mess.”
14. Thousands play Pokemon Go while driving, US research suggests
15. Pokémon Go Is Doing Just Fine, With or Without You
16. Catch That Bet: 888Sport Launches Pokémon Go-Style Sports Free Plays
17. AR ‘far more promising’ than VR, says Niantic CEO John Hanke
18. ITV and Sky buy stakes in 24-hour video gaming TV channel
19. ESL One will be the first eSports event livestreamed in VR
20. Yahoo Partners With Riot Games’ Collegiate eSports Division For Inaugural Campus Tournament
21. Raw Data the first VR game to make $1m in a month – report: Survios points to AAA quality and AAA price as it lays claim to revenue milestone
22. Why Successful Games in China Rarely Obtain the Equivalent Success in the West
23. Logitech buys Saitek from Mad Catz
24. Roadhouse Interactive confirms closure
25. No Man’s Sky PR strategy wasn’t great – Yoshida: Sony Worldwide Studios president criticizes Hello Games’ Sean Murray for over-promising on space exploration survival game
26. Remember that time Nintendo got rid of the headphone jack?: Years before the iPhone 7, the Game Boy Advance SP eschewed the standard as well.
27. Wasteland 2 studio aims to sell 3D models from its games to other devs
28. Microsoft Weaponizes Minecraft in the War Over Classrooms: Two years after buying the wildly popular video game, Microsoft is using Minecraft to vie for kids’ brain space and schools’ dollars.
29. National Videogame Foundation formed to ‘celebrate and preserve’
30. Believing is seeing: Orwell and surveillance sims
31. Poland puts CD Projekt Red’s Witcher on official postage stamps
32. Blizzard is saying goodbye to the 20-year-old Battle.net brand
33. Blizzard phasing out Battle.net branding: After 20 years, World of Warcraft maker decides its networking services don’t need their own moniker

DIGITAL

1. Canadian tech company Netsweeper helped Bahrain censor websites, says report: Citizen Lab says government blocked access to political opposition, human rights groups, anti-Islam sites
2. Netsweeper, tech used to censor dissent, funded by NRC in 2012: CitizenLab reports of potential use of firm’s tools for censorship pre-date 2012 grant
3. What an “MRI of the Internet” Can Reveal: Netsweeper in Bahrain (Ronald Deibert)
4. Court: With 3D printer gun files, national security interest trumps free speech – In Defense Distributed v. Department of State, the government wins this round.
5. HP detonates its timebomb: printers stop accepting third party ink en masse
6. HP Launched Delayed DRM Time Bomb To Disable Competing Printer Cartridges
7. Another Bad EU Ruling: WiFi Providers Can Be Forced To Require Passwords If Copyright Holders Demand It
8. If Printing Guns Is Legal, So Is Distributing the Plans (Noah Feldman)
9. Yet Another Report Says More Innovation, Rather Than More Enforcement, Reduces Piracy
10. Music Industry Says Business Is Good But It Still Wants YouTube to Pay Up
11. Federal judge says Bitcoin is money in case connected to JP Morgan hack: Despite definitions used by IRS and Florida judge, Anthony Murgio won’t have two charges dismissed.
12. Inside Google’s Internet Justice League And Its Ai-Powered War On Trolls
13. Is TV Doomed? Two-Thirds of Young Millennials Use an Ad Blocker to Watch, Study Says
14. YouTube Leads Facebook, Snapchat Among Teens
15. Wi-Fi providers not liable for copyright infringements, rules top EU court: But judgment spells trouble for anonymity on wireless networks, warn MEPs.
16. EU Commission Proposes New Right For Press Publications
17. Italy Proposes Law To Make Mocking People Online Illegal
18. Italy on the verge of the stupidest censorship law in European history
19. Anti-Piracy Outfits Caught Fabricating Takedown Notices
20. Inside Google’s Internet Justice League And Its Ai-Powered War On Trolls
21. Instagram’s new moderation policy is exactly how we should handle abuse on the internet
22. Chrome and Firefox Block Pirate Bay Over “Harmful Programs”
23. Creative Commons licenses under scrutiny—what does “noncommercial” mean?: Commercial v. noncommercial use of CC licenses. Where’s the line of demarcation?
24. Facebook Algorithms Take Down WordPress Lawyer’s Post About Idiocy Of Algorithmic Takedowns
25. Report: Donald Trump Would Put Peter Thiel On The Supreme Court… Wait, What?
26. MuckRock & Vice Announce Fellowship To Investigate Peter Thiel
27. Who Cares About the New iPhone Camera? The Real Change Is Apple Pay
28. The NFL Arrives on Twitter, and With It, the Future of Live TV
29. When Information Storage Gets Under Your Skin: Tiny implants can replace keys, store business cards and medical data—and eventually a lot more
30. Rihanna becomes the second artist to crack 10 billion views on Vevo
31. Apple CEO: VR Has “Lower Commercial Interest” than AR, New Hires from Magic Leap & Oculus
32. Is AR the future of the VR market?
33. Unpatent Launches Combination Crowdfunding/Crowdsourcing Platform To Invalidate Stupid Patents
34. Fitness trackers may actually make you gain weight: In two-year study, regular dieters did better than those with technology.
35. This Ebook Publisher Doesn’t Have Authors. It Has Writers’ Rooms
36. The Simulation Hypothesis: Is Reality All Just A Computer Simulation?
37. ‘The missing sense’: why our technology addiction makes us crave smells: Our online worlds are full of colors, words and sounds but lack something major – scents. Could that ever change?
38. The federal self-driving vehicles policy has finally been published
39. The George W. Bush White House ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails
40. How Pirates Shaped The Internet As We Know It

CREATIVITY

1. Golden Oldies for $5 Available at Walmart – the Stargrove Case has been Settled (Howard Knopf)
2. Copyright Claim against Beyoncé Gets Bounced in Scène à faire Tour de Force 
3. Copyright is not a divine right: Delhi HC
4. Breaking News: Major Victory for Students and Educational Access in DU Photocopy Case!
5. Is Access Copyright “Selling the Brooklyn Bridge”? (Howard Knopf)
6. Copyright Trolls Now Threatening College Students With Loss of Scholarship, Deportation
7. Newegg Sues Over Copied Legal Filing; Judge Rules That It’s Not Fair Use
8. Former Refugee Who Took Skittles Photograph Donald Trump Jr. Used In A Stupid Meme Threatens Copyright Lawsuit
9. Boise State Somehow Got A Trademark On Non-Green Athletic Fields
10. ‘Buck Rogers’ Pitch to Syfy Network Brings Legal Trouble for Author’s Heirs
11. You can create an online avatar that lives on after you die—but what’s the point?
12. The problem with “the pursuit of financial gain” in GS Media
13. Removal of ‘Love Plane’ by Banksy sparks tension in Liverpool 
14. Who Would Inherit Darth Vader’s Estate? 
15. The Fictional Fight Over Han Solo’s Estate
16. What’s Wrong With This Picture And Where Does it Come From? (Howard Knopf)
17. Why Do Americans Distrust the Media?: Donald Trump, anti-elite sentiment, and the dark side of media abundance
18. New protocol for notifying media of discretionary publication bans
19. Legal profession ‘willing to set logic aside’ to bar cameras from courtrooms: Canadians need to understand their court system, but there’s resistance from legal profession
20. How does race affect copyrightable expression? (Rebecca Tushnet) 

COMMUNICATIONS & BROADCASTING

1. Behind the Scenes of the Digital CanCon Consultation: No Netflix Regs, CRTC Review or Copyright Overhaul (Michael Geist)
2. Netflix plans to make half of its content original programming: Shows like House of Cards and Stranger Things have started a revolution.
3. CRTC gets frosted at Kellogg’s over email violations
4. New York City Threatens To Sue Verizon For Failure To Meet Fiber Deployment Promises
5. AT&T and Comcast helped elected official write plan to stall Google Fiber
6. Nashville Council Member Admits AT&T & Comcast Wrote The Anti-Google Fiber Bill She Submitted
7. Fox News’s Sean Hannity stars in Trump promotion
8. Cable Lobbyists Stop Using The Word Cable In Hopes You’ll Think Industry Has Evolved
9. Don’t let copyright box us in (Mark Lemley)

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Lawsuit: Who did the FBI pay to get into the San Bernardino attacker’s iPhone? – Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice Media sue FBI for contractual records.
2. AP, USA Today, Vice Sue FBI Over Refusal To Release Information About Contractor Who Cracked iPhone For It
3. The FBI sent a massive, unprecedented, troubling emergency alert about the New York bombing suspect
4. CBP Fails to Meaningfully Address Risks of Gathering Social Media Handles (EFF)
5. Op-ed: Why Obama should pardon Edward Snowden – A former Obama advisor on civil liberties says Snowden deserves one.
6. The House Intelligence Committee’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Snowden Report
7. House Intel Committee Says Snowden’s Not A Whistleblower, ‘Cause He Once Emailed His Boss’s Boss
8. House Intelligence Committee’s List Of ‘Snowden’s Lies’ Almost Entirely False
9. Senator John McCain Uses Cybersecurity Hearing To Try To Shame Twitter For Not Selling Data To The CIA
10. ‘It Looks Like You’re Trying To Harvest Cell Phone Data…:’ Quick-Start Guides For IMSI Catchers Leaked
11. Inspector General Says FBI Probably Shouldn’t Impersonate Journalists; FBI Says It Would Rather Impersonate Companies Anyway
12. Accused UK hacker to be extradited to the US to face charges: Judge finds that “vulnerable” Lauri Love should stand trial in the US.
13. Alibaba fires employees for hacking their way to free mooncakes: Hundreds of holiday cakes were purloined through weakness in internal website.
14. Brazilian Court Agrees Wikipedia Can Use Publicly-Available Personal Information For An Article
15. Is Privacy Policy Language Irrelevant To Consumers? (Lior Jacob Strahilevitz & Matthew B. Kugler)

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