News of the Week; November 29, 2017

GAMES

1. Study: Pokémon Go led to increase in traffic deaths, accidents – Detailed look at accident reports shows 26.5% relative increase near Pokéstops.
2. Parent rebukes Epic for suing teenage Fortnite player accused of cheating
3. 14-Year Old Video Game Cheater Sued, Mom Says He’s A Scapegoat [Update]
4. Good News for Game Developers: Court Extends Protections for Using Others’ Trademarks in the Advertising of Artistic Works
5. Activision Considering An Opposition To Trademark For Dog-Curbing Company ‘Call Of Doodee’
6. Destiny 2 misrepresented XP gains to its players until the devs got caught: After confirming a hidden “XP scaling” system, Bungie made XP grinds even slower.
7. Bungie Changes Destiny 2 XP System After Players Discover It Was Rigged
8. Bungie drops hidden Destiny 2XP scaling following player outcry
9. People Are Making Cults And Prisons In Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
10. Fans launch Black Friday boycott to #FixFIFA: Petition calling for changes has over 26,000 signaures
11. Belgium denounces loot boxes as gambling; Hawaiian legislator calls them “predatory”: Belgium decides that the combination of random rewards and pay-to-play is gambling.
12. Victorian gambling commission: “What occurs with ‘loot boxes’ does constitute gambling” – Commission has limited options for enforcement, looks to work with other agencies to bring about change
13. British Gambling Commission worried about ‘potential risk’ of loot boxes
14. British Gambling Commission concerned with “increasingly blurred” lines between games and gambling: Meanwhile, French politician calls for “prompt and sincere self-regulation” of the industry
15. UK Gambling Commission Determines Loot Boxes Aren’t Gambling Under British Law
16. Teen who spent $10k+ on microtransactions warns devs of the risk they pose: “The majority of the reason that I made my post was not really to slam EA or any of the companies that do this, but to share my story and to show that these transactions are not as innocent as they really appear to be. They can lead you down a path.”
17. Disney flexes its muscle over Star Wars and Marvel: The IP powerhouse values protecting that IP over any business relationship – as firms working on those properties would do well to remember
18. EA: Visceral’s canned Star Wars project too linear for modern tastes
19. Popularity of linear games declining – EA: CFO Blake Jorgensen says cancelled Star Wars project was a type of game “people don’t like as much today as they did five years ago or 10 years ago”
20. “You probably don’t want Darth Vader in pink”: EA CFO Blake Jorgensen says faithfulness to Star Wars canon prevented a cosmetic microtransaction model for Star Wars Battlefront II
21. Star Citizen now offering to sell in-game land: The most successful crowdfunded game ever is asking players to spend more
22. Animal Crossing Pocket Camp: Critical Consensus – A faithful yet divisive pocket-sized recreation of the beloved series, plagued by microtransactions
23. PC microtransaction revenue has doubled since 2012 –  SuperData report: Battlefront II is the poster child of a new and uncomfortable growing pain for the games industry
24. Take-Two president weighs in on loot boxes as ‘not gambling’: “The whole gambling regulator thing, we don’t view that thing as gambling. Our view is the same as the ESA statement, for the most part. So that’s going to play its course.”
25. Games industry is going 100% digital – Take-Two: President Karl Slatoff says physical game sales are probably going away on a 5-20 year timeline, weighs in on loot boxes
26. Games could be hit hard by net neutrality’s death: This is class warfare and gamers and small game companies are in the crosshairs
27. Appeals Court Affirms Dismissal on Standing Grounds of Biometric Privacy Suit over Videogame Facial Scan Feature 
28. Portraying migrants’ struggles via cellphones in Bury Me, My Love
29. Four And A Half Years After Raising $121,000, Skyrim Composer’s Kickstarter Is MIA 
30. Star Citizen offers $50-$100 in-game ‘land claims’ to boost dev funds
31. Global gaming revenue on par with sports at $149bn for 2017: Software revenue alone expected to reach $143.5 billion by 2020
32. ‘Pokémon Go’ Studio Niantic Completes $200M Funding Round
33. Pokémon global lifetime sales surpass 300m: Figure does not include Pokémon Go or downloads, but does include Snap, Stadium and all the other spin-offs
34. Nintendo Switch on track to outpace ten-month sales of the Wii by 20%
35. Nintendo’s “insane turnaround” driving holiday sales – Analyst: We chat with analysts in the wake of Black Friday and Cyber Monday
36. Report: Nintendo to start offering in-game power-ups via cereal boxes: Box for “Super Mario Cereal” reportedly doubles as an Amiibo.
37. Animal Crossing: Pocket Campimpressions: Nintendo should be ashamed – Lots of good AC series content, but core experience is too low on free-to-play scale.
38. VR headset sales are slowly rising out of the doldrums: Lower prices lead to increased interest as PlayStation Move dominates sales.
39. Analyst: 1M VR headsets shipped last quarter, an industry first
40. More than one million VR headsets sold last quarter: PlayStation VR accounts 80% of Japanese market
41. UK charts: PS4 and PSVR enjoy a strong Black Friday: PlayStation VR sold more than in the previous 18 weeks combined, strongest week of the year for software units and revenue
42. VR to star in China’s $1.5bn future tech theme park: Virtual rollercoasters, shooting games and alien tours will feature
43. Over 300,000 games consoles sold in the UK last week – GfK: Black Friday was the 13th biggest day ever for UK games retail
44. Sony posts record Black Friday hardware sales: Head of PSN Eric Lempel says company sold more PlayStations over the weekend than in the 23-year history of the brand
45. PUBG going mobile with Tencent’s help: The wildly popular game is not only coming to China, but it’s about to get the mobile treatment
46. Mobile still a moving target: GameChangerSF is finding more value bringing back lapsed players than searching for new ones
47. Report: Marvel Heroes dev Gazillion shuts down, lays off entire workforce
48. Gazillion Entertainment has officially shut down: Marvel Heroes goes offline a month ahead of schedule as studio closes
49. Rovio shares fall by 20 percent thanks to rising UA costs
50. Indie devs explore the benefits of working with a publisher: “Indie dev is a minefield now. To have a chance at a good level of success, you basically have to nail everything. That’s a really tall order, so devs are simply looking to stack the odds in their favor.”
51. The sunk cost fallacy: Devs describe how it almost destroyed them
52. 9 years in, Demon’s Souls is losing its online features
53. PC free-to-play revenue has doubled since 2012
54. Pokemon game series surpasses 300M lifetime sales
55. Pokemon Go developer Niantic nets $200M in funding
56. Investors pour $50M into social/casino mobile game dev Huuuge
57. Game sells Multiplay server hosting division to Unity for $25.2M
58. Unity buys GAME’s Multiplay Digital business for £19m: GAME bought the entire Multiplay division for £20m almost 3 years ago
59. Zelda concert producer: “I just want to bring video game music to the masses”: Jason Michael Paul looks back on 14 years of creating video game concerts
60. Oral History: How Marvel’s Creative Head Helped Bring Nintendo To America

DIGITAL

1. Truthfeed Spreads Pro-Trump Propaganda: The website has connections to the president’s camp—and white supremacists.
2. YouTube pulls ads on 2 million inappropriate children’s videos: It’s also investigating autocomplete search after suggestions for child exploitation content
3. YouTube Investigating Pedophiliac Phrases In Autocomplete Search Suggestions
4. Adidas, Mars Among Brands To Suspend YouTube Campaigns In Response To Inappropriate Kids Videos
5. YouTube’s Creepy Kid Problem Was Worse Than We Thought
6. Making a federal case out of revenge porn 
7. Chicago Considers Another Dumb ‘Texting And Walking’ Law To Raise Revenue
8. The “Lowdown” on DMCA Regulations and Take-Downs
9. YouTube Announces Its Version Of Snapchat’s Stories Among Community Tab Updates 
10. Apple Projected to Spend $4.2 Billion on Original Content by 2022
11. Analyst Projects Apple’s Original Content Budget Will Rise To $4.2 Billion Per Year By 2022
12. Apple Launches New YouTube Channel With Handful Of How-To Videos
13. BuzzFeed To Lay Off Roughly 100 Staffers Amid Missed Revenue Goals
14. BuzzFeed Lays Off About 100 Staffers, Refocuses Content Efforts 
15. The Potential Of Artificial Intelligence In The Future Of Sports
16. Artificial intelligence to impact personal injury law
17. The challenges of patenting artificial intelligence
18. Designing Artificial Intelligence to Explain Itself: A new working paper maps out critical starting points for thinking about explanation in AI systems.
19. A Layered Model for AI Governance
20. Manufacturing an Artificial Intelligence Revolution (Yarden Katz)
21. Cookie law conundrum: Do you know what your webmaster is busy baking?
22. Consumer protection and online advertising
23. Websites use your CPU to mine cryptocurrency even when you close your browser: Resource-draining code hides in pop-under windows that can remain open indefinitely.
24. Uber’s crisis deepens with record quarterly loss: Uber continues disrupting old-fashioned notions of profit.
25. Uber Waymo Trial Delayed After Justice Department Jumps In, Unprompted, To Tell Judge That Uber Was Withholding Evidence
26. Judge delays trial after ex-Uber employee describes rogue behavior: Richard Jacobs, an ex-security official at Uber, testified in court Tuesday.
27. Chicago: Uber’s claim that hackers fully deleted stolen data is “nonsensical” – Uber’s been sued at least 11 times in just 1 week, faces new scrutiny from Senate.
28. Uber hit with 2 lawsuits over gigantic 2016 data breach: “Uber knew or should have known its security systems were inadequate.” 
29. Cyber Monday topped Prime Day to become Amazon’s biggest shopping day ever
30. Facebook (still) lets housing advertisers exclude users by race: ProPublica bought ads that excluded African-Americans, Spanish speakers, Muslims.
31. How Bored Panda Survived Facebook’s Clickbait Purge
32. The End Of The Social Era Can’t Come Soon Enough: It seems increasingly likely that our society will one day view our infatuation with Twitter, Facebook, and the like as a passing, often destructive fad.
33. Elon Musk wins bet, finishing massive battery installation in 100 days: South Australia battery installation has 100MW capacity, a world record.
34. Email Is Broken. Can Anyone Fix It?
35. Subverting Democracy, Advertising, and the Economy Through Bots 
36. Platform Market Power (Kenneth Bamberger & Orly Lobel)

CREATIVITY 

1.  UK High Court rules that TV Show Formats can be Copyright Protected
2. Journalism Is Imploding Just When We Need It Most
3. Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA Opposes Trademark Application For Dog-Walking Company Called Woof-Tang Clan
4. Blade Runner 2049 Director Opens Up About the Film’s Treatment of Women
5. Wilfrid Laurier graduate student delivers a wake-up call
6. Here’s the full recording of Wilfrid Laurier reprimanding Lindsay Shepherd for showing a Jordan Peterson video: Teaching assistant Shepherd was accused of creating a ‘toxic climate’ at the university by screening a televised debate discussing gender-neutral pronouns
7. Christie Blatchford: Here’s where Laurier can stick their apology to Lindsay Shepherd: Rambukkana’s ‘open letter’ is all I expected of a man who would invoke the spectre of Hitler to try to shut down an underling — craven, dissembling, revisionist
8. Why Wilfrid Laurier University’s president apologized to Lindsay Shepherd: Deborah MacLatchy says she regrets how the meeting was conducted
9. Counter-protests at Wilfrid Laurier University over freedom of speech turn — well, one man was shouting
10. Teaching assistant who was sanctioned questions sincerity of Wilfrid Laurier University’s apology: ‘I didn’t expect their apology to be sincere. I don’t think that they are sincere,’
11. Modern Educayshun: Mao, Orwell and Kafka at Wilfrid Laurier University
12. Commentary: Laurier University incident demonstrates defence of certain kinds of speech
13. Neither Wilfrid Laurier University’s methods nor teaching assistant’s debate helped trans people: Its actions come across as high-handed thought-policing that plays right into the hands of the intolerant, Shree Paradkar writes.
14. A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation.
15. How media brands are using marketing to turn accusations of fake news into page views
16. The battle over Gucci’s trademark stripes: Gucci’s trademark infringement claim against Forever 21 took a major step forward this month after a US district court dismissed the counterclaim by the fast fashion chain seeking cancellation of the disputed marks. Gucci claims that Forever 21 has infringed the trademarks protecting its ‘iconic stripe motifs’ in blue-red-blue and green-red-green.
17. The Role of Trademark Law in the History of US Visual Identity Design, c.1860–1960 (Carma Gorman)
18. How Patents Have Contributed To The Opioid Crisis 

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Rogers to cut off support for Viceland TV station
2.  CASL is Constitutional (And Some Guidance on How to Interpret It)
3. Ajit Pai’s Big Lie
4. Ajit Pai’s Shell Game
5. Comcast Spent Millions Repealing Net Neutrality, Now Wants You To Believe It Won’t Take Full, Brutal Advantage 
6. Comcast deleted net neutrality pledge the same day FCC announced repeal: Three-year-old “no paid prioritization” pledge was suddenly removed.
7. Comcast hints at plan for paid fast lanes after net neutrality repeal: Comcast still won’t block or throttle—but paid prioritization may be on the way.
8. AT&T and Comcast lawsuit has nullified a city’s broadband competition law – Bad news for Google Fiber: Nashville utility pole ordinance invalidated by judge.
9. Judge Backs AT&T, Comcast Nuisance Suit Against Google Fiber In Nashville
10. Nazis Want Net Neutrality Repealed To ‘Unleash A Plague Of Frogs On Twitter.’ It Won’t Happen
11. FCC explains why public support for net neutrality won’t stop repeal: Americans who support net neutrality find that their voices don’t count for much.
12. Ajit Pai blames Cher and Hulk actor for ginning up net neutrality support: Net neutrality support is just “fear-mongering and hysteria,” FCC chair says.
13. NY Attorney General Investigating Why Dead People Supported The FCC’s Attack On Net Neutrality
14. The FCC’s Attack On Net Neutrality Is Based Entirely On Debunked Lobbyist Garbage Data
15. Charter is using net neutrality repeal to fight lawsuit over slow speeds: Charter cites FCC preemption of state net neutrality rules in case filed by NY. 
16. More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked: I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.
17. What An Internet Analyst Got Wrong About Net Neutrality
18. What Actually Happens the Day Net Neutrality Is Repealed
19. Mark Cuban Still Has Absolutely No Idea How Net Neutrality Works
20. Net Neutrality Divide: Canada and the U.S. Go Separate Ways on an Open Internet (Michael Geist)
21. AT&T’s C.E.O. Meets Trump’s Justice
22. AT&T says it should be allowed to buy Time Warner because Comcast bought NBC: AT&T will use customer data to boost advertising business, court filing says. 
23. FCC Adopts Rules Allowing Voice Service Providers to Block Illegal Robocalls 
24. The VCAST decision: how to turn a private copying case into a case about communication/making available to the public
25. TV[R]EV: Is Local TV Worth Saving?

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. SCC To Weigh In On Fees For Identifying ISP Subscribers: Rogers v. Voltage 
2. Supreme Court to rule on Rogers’ charges for infringer names and addresses
3. Yet Another Legal Action By Dogged Privacy Activist Brings Good News And Bad News For Facebook In EU’s Highest Court
4. Security firm was front for advanced Chinese hacking operation, Feds say: The accused hacked 3 multinational corporations in pursuit of intellectual property.
5. Hacker pleads guilty to huge Yahoo hack, admits helping Russia’s FSB: Three fellow co-defendants remain at large in Russia, unlikely to be extradited.
6. Justices hear case that could reshape location privacy in the cellular age – Gorsuch: Unfettered access is “exactly what the framers were concerned about.”
7. 10 Reasons Why the Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine Should Be Overruled in Carpenter v. US (Daniel Solove)
8. Supreme Court Must Understand: Cell Phones Aren’t Optional
9. The Fifth Amendment, Decryption and Biometric Passcodes
10. Judge Tosses Long-Running Section 215 Surveillance Lawsuit
11. Big Brother is Watching You: Feds Now Vetting Foreign Workers Via Social Media 
12. Want your kid to behave this Christmas? There’s an app for that
13. What Amazon Echo And Google Home Do With Your Voice Data
14. It’s Not Always AI That Sifts Through Your Sensitive Info
15. Australian man uses snack bags as Faraday cage to block tracking by employer: On 140 occasions, electrician logged that he was working while concealing his location.
16. Anyone Can Hack Macos High Sierra Just By Typing “Root”
17. macOS bug lets you log in as admin with no password required: Here’s how to protect yourself until Apple patches bafflingly bad bug.
18. Federal student aid site offers one-stop shopping for ID thieves?: If you have someone’s name, birthdate, and SSN, FAFSA site will give up sensitive data.
19. Maine Government Agency Tries To Charge Public Records Requester $750 For Opening A PDF
20. How four Microsoft engineers proved that the “darknet” would defeat DRM – From the archives: How this quartet nearly got fired for it.

Jon