News of the Week

GAMES

1. “Suspicious male in possession of flight simulator game” lawsuit moves ahead: Wiley Gill drew cops’ attention as Muslim convert; feds can’t dismiss his case.

2. Super Mario 64 and ‘mod’ culture: meet the man behind the high-def makeover: The revered video game is being re-imagined by Aryok Piñera, who started the project alone but now leads a motley crew dozens strong. The legality of such ‘mods’ is murky, but that won’t affect its practitioners’ passion for perfecting

3. People Are Already Making Bizarre Mods For Dragon Ball Xenoverse

4. What A Strong Modding Community Can Do: How Doom Has Been Yanked Into The Selfie Age

5. Makers Of Flow Free® Mobile Game Sue Cloner For Copyright And Trademark Infringement

6. ESA Downplays Its Level of Cooperation With The Administration On Cybersecurity Efforts

7. Death threats prompt PAX East exit for Brianna Wu’s Giant Spacekat

8. SCEE president: Gamergate “absolutely horrible”

9. Video Games’ Blackness Problem

10. The Order: 1886 Dev Says “Internet Is The New Playground For Bullies”

11. Troll deletes 11-year-old’s Destiny characters: “Henry has learned his lesson the hard way.”

+ Man Accused Of Deleting 11-Year-Old’s Destiny Data Also A Victim

12. Canadian Games Industry Wants Improvements To Temporary Foreign Worker Guidelines

13. Fake ‘Darkest Dungeon’ Game Pulled From Windows Game Store

14. Tim Schaefer Defends Peter Molyneux

15. PS4 to outsell Xbox One by 40% through 2018 – Report

16. King reigns as Zynga slumps – but why?

17. You got TV in my video game: Telltale, Lionsgate partner for episodic hybrid

18. Sega Networks purchases Demiurge Studios

19. Is Sega the next Atari?: Former Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske bemoans 20 years of wrong decisions from the Sonic maker, weighs in on whether Nintendo should go mobile

20. Diablo gets microtransactions as Blizzard experiments

21. Nintendo has started making bad free-to-play games like everybody else: Pokemon Shuffle brings the worst of mobile gaming to your 3DS

22. How Monopoly Helped Win World War II

23. How Madden Ratings Are Made: The Secretprocess That Turnsnfl Players Into Digital Gods

24. AI masters 49 Atari 2600 games without instructions: Brain-like artificial intelligence almost as good as professional games tester.

DIGITAL

25. You Had One Job, Lenovo: And it didn’t involve sneaking malicious adware onto your customers’ computers.

+ Superfish: A History Of Malware Complaints And International Surveillance

+ Thought Komodia/Superfish Bug Was Really, Really Bad? It’s Much, Much Worse!

+ EFF unearths evidence of possible Superfish-style attacks in the wild: Crypto-busting apps may have been exploited against visitors of Google and dozens more.

26. Yahoo exec goes mano a mano with NSA director over crypto backdoors

27. The Great Sim Heist: How Spies Stole The Keys To The Encryption Castle

+ NSA’s Stealing Keys To Mobile Phone Encryption Shows Why Mandatory Backdoors To Encryption Is A Horrible Idea

28. Google: Proposed government-sanctioned hacking is a threat to us all – “The implications of this expansion of warrant power are significant.”

29. “Total Information Awareness”: The Disastrous Privacy Consequences of Bill C-51 (Michael Geist)

30. Humiliating Admission By UK Government That Yet More Of Its Surveillance Was Unlawful

31. Canadian Spies Collect Domestic Emails In Secret Security Sweep

32. Is Retweeting ISIS ‘Material Support Of Terrorism’?

33. World Wide Web Foundation: It’s Time The Internet Became a Basic Human Right

34. UK’s House of Lords Calls For Reclassification Of Internet Access As A ‘Public Utility’

35. We must bulldoze what’s left of the nerdy white men’s Internet

36. What’s Really at Stake in Ellen Pao’s Kleiner Perkins Lawsuit

37. Women are leaving the tech industry in droves

38. The big money behind Iran’s Internet censorship

39. Governance of Online Intermediaries: Observations from a Series of National Case Studies (Urs Gasser & Wolfgang Schulz)

40. Nominee For Attorney General Tap Dances Around Senator Franken’s Question About Aaron Swartz

41. Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada releases research report on privacy and cybersecurity (Timothy Denton)

42. Facebook’s Updated Privacy Policy Breaches EU Law, Belgian Study Claims; Other Countries Investigating

43. Be Careful What You Wish For: Bell Launches Legal Challenge Against CRTC Net Neutrality Decision (Michael Geist)

44. Something Is Going Right: Net Neutrality and the FCC (Lawrence Lessig)

45. Despite What The FCC Says, Some Carriers Still Make It Hard To Unlock Your Phone

46. The “Browsewrap”/”Clickwrap” Distinction Is Falling Apart

47. Nvidia hit with class-action lawsuit over graphics card RAM issues: Slow RAM partition in the GTX 970 leads to false advertising claim.

48. Ontario Securities Commission Updates Rules on Equity Crowdfunding, Startup Capital

49. Virtual currency ATM providers and trading platforms must now be authorised in Quebec

50. Why one photographer decided to fight a patent on online contests: EFF’s newest client: “How can you have a patent on a contest? It’s not logical.”

51. Reddit bans nude images posted without consent

52. Study shows patent licenses don’t lead to tech transfer

53. Apple ordered to pay $533-million for patent infringement

54. Machinima gets another $24 million in funding from Warner Bros.

55. The Gig Economy Won’t Last Because It’s Being Sued To Death: If Uber, Lyft, and others don’t stop relying on contract workers, business could crumble. Is it time for a new definition of employee?

56. 10 Fair Use Misconceptions

57. A Decade Later, YouTube Remains a Mystery, Especially to Itself: It’s way too complicated to explain this marvelous history quickly, but let’s try anyway

58. How a 13-year-old’s one-line blog post became a worldwide meme

59. Look Ma, No Hands: Drones You Can Pilot With Your Mind

CREATIVITY

60. Why Is Fair Use Good For Authors? (Pamela Samuelson)

61. Copyright Mixtape: How The “Blurred Lines” Lawsuit Could Change Music Forever

62. German court limits performances of Brecht play: Berthold Brecht’s heirs and notorious theater director Frank Castorf have reached an agreement over a controversial production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal.” The production will only be shown two more times.

63. Oscars: A Guide to Best Picture Intellectual Property Litigation

64. Judge tosses ‘Frozen’ lawsuit filed by N.J. author who accused Disney of ripoff

65. How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked—and Played: Decades before 3-D printers brought manufacturing closer to home, copiers transformed offices, politics and art

66. Martin Mills: New Billboard Chart Risks Dumbing Down Music

67. The Dangers Of Digital: Brian Eno On Technology And Modern Music

jon

GAMES

1. Apple removing guns in iOS App Store promo screenshots: You can have guns in your game, but just don’t show them off, OK?

+ App Store devs report crackdown on images of guns and violence

+ Developers Say Apple Is Rejecting Games For Having Images Of Guns

2. Report: Valve Censoring Messages About Torrent Site in Steam Chat

3. ESA Downplays Its Level of Cooperation With The Administration On Cybersecurity Efforts

4. Zenimax Sends Cease & Desist Letter to ‘Fortress Fallout’ Makers

5. Law & Order SVU takes on GamerGate, everyone loses: Swatting, doxing, social justice warriors, and Ice-T whining about “campers.”

6. Mortal Kombat X Female Characters Will Be More Realistically Proportioned

7. Borders between devs, players blurring – Raymond

8. EA must lead on digital games transparency

9. Molyneux on Godus: “I made some horrendous mistakes”

+ Could Godus’ failure fuel a crowdfunding backlash?

+ On Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux: The structure of crowdfunding encourages overpromising and under-delivering.

+ Peter Molyneux Won’t Do Interviews After Death Threats

10. YoYo Games sells to PlayTech for $16.4 million

11. Nintendo cancels TVii for Europe

12. Zynga loses $226m in 2014, shutters Zynga China

+ Analyst calls for Zynga to fire Mattrick

13. Report: eSports revenues to hit $465m in 2017

14. World Of Warcraft pet raises $1.9m for Ebola

15. This Immersive Michael Jordan Simulator Is the World’s Coolest Basketball Court

16. Abstract Announcement for International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS) 6(4)

DIGITAL

17. How tech trials force a choice between bad people and bad law

+ That 😉 You Type Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law

18. Patent troll claims to own Bluetooth, scores $15.7M verdict against Samsung

19. Europe: Now is the time to fix copyright!

20. Why the Copyright Board of Canada Needs a Leafs-Style Tear-Down

21. Fox hurts America yet again, losing fair use sj motion (Rebecca Tushnet)

22. All of This Has Happened Before and All of This Will Happen Again: Innovation in Copyright Licensing (Rebecca Tushnet)

23. Facebook still suspending Native Americans over ‘real name’ policy: Unlike Katy Perry’s Left Shark, many have to provide multiple forms of ID to prove they are who they say they are in latest row over controversial policy

24. Facebook legacy contact can keep your profile updated after you die: Rolling out in the U.S., users can choose legacy contact or opt to have profile deleted forever

25. How Google determined our right to be forgotten: Google has acted as judge, jury and executioner in the wake of Europe’s right to be forgotten ruling. But what does society lose when a private corporation rules public information?

26. Samsung Television Spies on Viewers

+ Samsung Tweaks Television Policy Over Privacy Concerns

27. Russia Reaches The Censorship Endgame: Banning VPNs, Tor And Web Proxies

+ The Anti-Information Age: How governments are reinventing censorship in the 21st century

+ Glavin: The fiasco of bill C-51

+ Bill C-51 Backgrounder #1: The New Advocating or Promoting Terrorism Offence (Craig Forcese & Kent Roach)

+ Bill C-51 Backgrounder #2: The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s Proposed Power to ‘Reduce’ Security Threats Through Conduct that May Violate the Law and Charter (Craig Forcese & Kent Roach)

+ Obama Signs Executive Order Encouraging Private-Sector Companies To Share Cyber Security Information

+ Did British Spies Use NSA Data to Spy on You? (Quinn Norton)

+ Apple CEO Tim Cook Makes It Clear That He’s Not At All Interested In Giving The Government Backdoors To iOS Encryption

+ Thank Snowden: Internet Industry Now Considers The Intelligence Community An Adversary, Not A Partner

+ How “omnipotent” hackers tied to NSA hid for 14 years—and were found at last: “Equation Group” ran the most advanced hacking operation ever uncovered.

28. Why Bell’s Targeted Ad Approach Falls Short on Privacy (Michael Geist)

29. Why we need social media: Press freedom is still declining rapidly

30. Notorious 8chan “subboard” has history wiped after federal judge’s doxing

31. Report: Millions stolen from banks through sophisticated malware

32. Corruption in Internet Governance – Bribery, Cronyism and Nepotism (Ewan Sutherland)

33. Megaupload Programmer Takes Plea Deal, Though It’s Still Unclear What Criminal Law He Violated

34. Your cable company hates you: Why Comcast abuses its customers – That customer service call wasn’t an isolated incident. It’s just part of a depressingly effective business model

35. The Future of Crime: Smartphone Tracking, Neurohacking, and AI Assisted Murder

36. How the NBA became the first major sport to embrace VR: Will intimate access make it more than a gimmick?

37. The revolution wasn’t televised: The early days of YouTube

38. Modern Family’s new episode never leaves the screen of a MacBook Pro: ‘Connection Lost’ feels like a half-hour Apple commercial — but it actually works

39. How Silicon Valley’s counterculture went corporate and ruined everything

40. The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, By Ants

CREATIVITY

41. Journalists Face Increasing Danger As Press Freedoms Collapse Worldwide

42. The Untold Story: How Radius Brought the Edward Snowden Doc ‘Citizenfour’ to America

43. Dan Gilbert Didn’t Like A Yahoo Blog Post, So Yahoo Deleted It

44. Dear Elon Musk: Please Put SpaceX Photos In The Public Domain

+ When SpaceX Takes Photos on a NASA Mission, Copyright Law Explodes

45. The Canadian Privacy Cases of 2014

46. Aural, erotic, outrageous: From Madonna to Miley, how video changed the love song

47. How networks speed up TV shows to shove more ads in your unsuspecting face

jon

GAMES

1. ‘DOA 5: Last Round’ Producer Concerned About The ‘Morality’ Of Modders

+ Dead or Alive maker asks modders to be “good and moral” with content: Series’ first PC port could be its last if mod community doesn’t behave.

2. Report: Turkish Government Investigating Violence in ‘Minecraft’

3. Nintendo’s YouTuber Affiliate Plan Is A Bureaucratic Mess Of Delays And Control

4. Content Protection Company Makes Bogus ContentID Claims On Gameplay Videos; Sega Steps In To Clean The Mess Up

5. Valve warns CS:GO tournament players against gambling on events: Stance follows match-fixing scandal that led to prominent player bans.

6. Garena Philippines eSports Changes Policy on LGBT Players in Iron Solari League

7. Brianna Wu speaks up about death threats and personal cost of opposing #GamerGate

8. Women in Games: Everyone needs a hero

9. Crash Override: “Our mission is to return control to the victim”

10. PSA: ‘Law & Order: SVU’ Tackles Gaming, Online Harassment, and More in Tonight’s Episode

11. Video Games Were Never a ‘Boys Club,’ and Never Will Be

12. Pro CS:Go Players Get Banned For Match Fixing, Five Get Reinstated After Investigation

13. ‘I put a troll in jail using my PlayStation’

14. Diablo lll Cheaters Banned

15. More Violent Video Game Research Says Real World Violence Link Is (Junk)

16. Gamer gets swatted while streaming before thousands of viewers: Incidents of so-called swatting pranks appear to be increasing.

17. Video Game Maker Sued By Lawyer/Necromancer For Featuring General Patton In-Game

18. GDC Panel Discussion Explores Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in Games About War

19. More Clarifications From Nintendo on Creator’s Program

20. Godus designer admits Kickstarter promises likely can’t be kept

21. Valve “really uncomfortable” with devs giving away game keys

22. Is Premium Mobile Gaming Viable?

23. $2 Million Up For Grabs In The 2015 Pokémon World Championships

24. Blizzard: “We view eSports as a community builder”

25. TheScore Jumps on Plans to Cover Video Games Like Sports

26. Netflix Is Making A ‘Game Of Thrones’ For All Ages Legend Of Zelda TV Series

27. Call of Duty European championships to be hosted by Royal Opera House: To paraphrase the popular saying: it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady scores a seven-hit killstreak

28. Sony Xperia Z3 range offers PS4 Remote Play

29. How Sega Built The Genesis

DIGITAL

30. What Silicon Valley Thinks of Women

31. UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’: Regulations governing access to intercepted information obtained by NSA breached human rights laws, according to Investigatory Powers Tribunal

32. What Rogers will tell you about the police looking into your account

33. Intelligence Community’s Top Lawyer Endorses Desire For Unicorns, Leprechauns & Golden Keys That Don’t Undermine Encryption

34. On Polemics And Substance In Bill C-51 Antiterrorism Act (Craig Forcese)

35. An Open Letter to Prime Minister Cameron: 20th-century solutions won’t help 21st-century surveillance (Jonathan Zittrain)

36. RuNet Watchdog ‘Baffled’ by Twitter’s Refusal to Block Kremlin’s Opponents

37. NSA wins key ruling in years-old phone and Internet spying lawsuit: Case not over yet, says EFF, will continue “fight to end NSA mass surveillance.”

38. EFF Responds to USTR Bullying the World to Repeat Our Copyright Mistakes

+ US’s ‘Naughty List’ Of Countries Whose Intellectual Property Rules We Don’t Like Is A Joke That’s No Longer Funny

39. Fifty Shades Of Fair Use: from the be-thankful-for-fair-use dept

40. Left Shark Bites Back: 3D Printer Sculptor Hires Lawyer To Respond To Katy Perry’s Bogus Takedown

+ Taylor Swift One Ups Katy Perry Again: Threatens To Sue Fans For Etsy Fan Products

41. In Defence of the CRTC’s Super Bowl Advertising Ruling (Michael Geist)

42. Common law trademark exempt to the application of the charter of the French Language

43. Twitter CEO: ‘We suck at dealing with abuse’ – Dick Costolo says trolls are costing Twitter users

44. The Internet is Real: Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road trial, and the quasi-fictions of internet culture.

45. The Report of the Advisory Council to Google on the Right to be Forgotten

46. Will the internet of things finally kill privacy?: Why the FTC’s new report doesn’t go far enough

47. An Exclusive Look at Sony’s Hacking Saga

48. Google executives explain why the MBA approach to building things is ‘stupid’

49. TracFone Pays $40 Million Settlement to FTC For Throttling ‘Unlimited’ Customers

50. FCC Previews ‘New Rules for Protecting the Open Internet’

51. The Decision That Could Finally Kill the Revenge-Porn Business: The Federal Trade Commission says people cannot exploit personal information shared in confidence for commercial gain.

52. People were asked to read aloud the terms and conditions for popular apps and were shocked by what they actually agreed to

53. Samsung’s Smart TV privacy policy sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

+ Today In Creepy Privacy Policies, Samsung’s Eavesdropping TV

54. Google’s slippery slope: If search giant pays Twitter for content, should it pay all publishers?

55. Apple Is Finally Adding the Racially Diverse Emojis You’ve Been Waiting For

56. How YouTube changed the world

57. Why Google Glass Broke

58. Why Oculus is Doomed

59. The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence

60. Our Fear of Artificial Intelligence: A true AI might ruin the world—but that assumes it’s possible at all.

61. Why Robot?: Automated journalism is no longer science fiction. It’s time to change what we call it.

+ Coding Creativity: Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author (Annemarie Bridy)

62. Before we give doors and toasters sentience, we should decide what we’re comfortable with first: It’s becoming more and more common for everyday appliances to have features we don’t expect, and the implications for privacy and freedom can be surprisingly profound. We should be sure we know what we’re buying into.

63. Rethinking Duration: Disaggregating Copyright’s Rewards and Incentives via a System of Rolling Rights (Rebecca Giblin)

CREATIVITY

64. Labels, not Spotify, are (hurting) artists and breaking the music industry. Here’s how to fix it.

65. The powerful cheat for themselves, the powerless cheat for others: The upper class isn’t less ethical, just more likely to lie for selfish reasons.

66. Investigative Journalists and Digital Security: Perceptions of Vulnerability and Changes in Behavior (Pew Research Center)

67. Yes, Major Record Labels Are Keeping Nearly All The Money They Get From Spotify, Rather Than Giving It To Artists

68. No copyright for recipes, says US court

69. How Japan became a pop culture superpower: Virtually every childhood craze of the past 30 years has its beginnings in Japan. Today its influence is stronger than ever

70. What the Vinyl “Comeback” Really Looks Like…

71. A History Of The Arcade And The Arcade-Goer

jon

GAMES

1. EFF Files Amicus Brief Supporting EA in ‘Davis v. EA’

2. Techland Responds To ‘Dying Light’ Modding Community Concerns

+ ESA apologizes for DMCA claim on Dying Light mod files: Developer Techland also commits to return blocked modding features.

3. Blizzard releases Warcraft III content for use by Starcraft II modders: Characters, sounds, interface, and more available for cross-franchise modding.

4. Left Behind Games revenue scheme hits $6 million in charges: Ronald Zaucha fined $2.6 million for his role in a plan to inflate the Christian developer’s revenue by 1300 per cent

5. Nintendo to share up to 70 percent of ad revenue with game YouTubers: Video partnership program comes with some important restrictions, though.

+ YouTubers Respond To ‘Nintendo Creator’s Program’

+ PewDiePie criticizes Nintendo’s Let’s Play plans

6. Introducing ‘Joystiq X Engadget’: A new beginning

7. Hearthstone’s Team Archon releases Hosty hours after cheating allegations

8. Inside the Tragic, Obsessive World of Video Game Addicts

9. Code Reseller Targeted By Ubisoft Denies Wrongdoing

10. Raptr warns users of security breach

11. League of Legends e-sports organizer limits lesbian and transgender participants: After uproar, gaming tournament organizers remove sexuality-based restrictions.

12. War Games: the link between gaming and military recruitment

13. PlayStation buoyant in mixed Sony quarter

14. SOE acquired, becomes Daybreak Game Company

15. Report: Alibaba pumps $10 million into Ouya microconsole to launch in China

16. Gree posts Q2 loss of ¥7.66bn on sales of ¥24.1bn

17. Sega Sammy Announces Restructuring Plans, Mass Layoffs

18. Law & Order SVU Tackles Video Games and Online Harassment in Upcoming Episode

19. Attorney For Former RI Secretary of State Faces Fine Over 38 Studios Court Action

20. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell on Steve Jobs and virtual reality

21. EFF’s ‘Stupid Patent of the Month’ Is Game-Related

22. Marshawn Lynch And Rob Gronkowski Have An Extreme ‘Mortal Kombat’ Showdown

23. What Super Bowl ads can (and can’t) tell us about the video game market: Mobile game makers, not AAA publishers, push their product to viewers.

DIGITAL

24. The Pirate Bay Is Back After Nearly Two Months Of Downtime

25. EFF Wins Battle Over Secret Legal Opinions on Government Spying: Department of Justice to Release Analysis of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agency Access to Census Records

26. Gag order prevented Google from disclosing WikiLeaks probe for 3 years: Search giant says its policy always contests secrecy orders tacked to data requests.

+ Battle Over Google Subpoena Threatens Critical Online Free Speech Protections: Federal Law Blocks Extraordinary and Burdensome Subpoena

+ Feds Gagged Google Over Wikileaks Warrants Because They Were ‘Upset By The Backlash’ To Similar Twitter Warrants

27. Nobody Saw This Coming: Now China Too Wants Company Encryption Keys And Backdoors In Hardware And Software

28. The Guardian Details The NSA’s Spying Activities on Leaky Apps Like ‘Angry Birds’

29. Harper proposes new powers for spies, plays down civil liberties concerns

+ Canada’s privacy commissioner weighs in on anti-terror bill; takes aim at oversight.

30. Cyber surveillance worries most Canadians: privacy czar’s poll: Privacy erosion leaving growing number ‘extremely concerned’

31. The Canadian Privacy and Civil Liberties Punch in the Gut (or Why CSE/CSIS Oversight is Not Enough) (Michael Geist)

32. Government’s Cloud Computing Strategy Focused on Keeping Data in Canada

33. Toronto-made computer program exposes who’s tracking you: TrackerSSL, developed by a research fellow at the U of T’s Citizen Lab, shows web users when their information is insecure and vulnerable to snooping.

34. “No Fast Lanes and Slow Lanes”: CRTC Rules Bell’s Mobile TV Service Violates Telecommunications Act (Michael Geist)

35. CRTC says that the future of over-the-air television is here, and it looks a lot like the past

36. FCC Raises Minimum Broadband Standards Substantially

+ FCC’s new broadband internet target leaves Canada behind: U.S. says broadband internet downloads must hit 25 Mbps, while Canada still aims for 5 Mbps

37. FCC Prohibits American Businesses From Blocking Wi-Fi Signals

38. Verizon Finally Buckles, Will Allow A Total Opt Out From Sneaky Super Cookies

39. The sharing economy is a lie: Uber, Ayn Rand and the truth about tech and libertarians – Disruptive companies talk a good game about sharing. Uber’s really just an under-regulated company making riches

40. The NFL wants you to think these things are illegal: Yes, you can record Sunday’s game. And you can talk about it.

+ My Official Super Bowl Television Post (Bruce Boyden)

41. Copyright Law Is Eating Away At Our Cultural History: And It’s Time To Fix That

42. From vinyl to digital – the second hand digital music market and implications for copyright

43. In need of a tune up: Wisconsin’s Court of Appeals considers personal jurisdiction in the internet age 

44. New challenges for old laws: B.C. Court considers employee misuse of social media

45. Revenge Porn & Canadian Law

46. Formation 8 And Palantir Founder Joe Lonsdale Named In Sexual Assault Lawsuit

47. Why Does Facebook Censor Gay Images?

48. Tech’s High Barrier to Entry for the Underprivileged

49. Study: Facebook Can Cause Depression

50. From “Trust In News” to “News Profiling”

CREATIVITY

51. When Musicians Unintentionally Steal: Sam Smith’s hit single sounds an awful lot like a Tom Petty song, but that doesn’t make him some kind of artistic hack.

51.Bizarre Plagiarism Fight Erupts After Two People Take Exact Same Photo

52. My Gravity Lawsuit And How It Affects Every Writer Who Sells To Hollywood

53. How foreign governments can influence American media – and tried to block my documentary

54. How ‘Selma’ Got Smeared: On historical drama and its malcontents

55. The Digital Future of TV Networks & The Original Series Crunch

56. Creator Or Buyer: Who Really Owns The Art?

57. French Civil Supreme Court: A Corporation Cannot be the Author of a Work Protected by Copyright

jon

GAMES

1. Company Wants All EA Profits From Nine Sports Games Due To Alleged Patent Infringement

2. ‘DOTA’ Banned in Salawag, Philippines After Fatal Stabbings

3. Valve Bans ‘Counter-Strike’ Pros For Match Fixing

4. Lohan v. Take Two – Reply in Support of Motion to Dismiss.pdf

5. One Week of Harassment on Twitter (Anita Sakeesian)

6. Feminist Frequency to pivot toward combating “gendered online harassment”: FF discloses financials, announces plans for new “masculinity in games” video series.

7. Digital addiction afflicts young players, cramps lives: Growing numbers of people are seriously hooked on video games, social media, digital devices

8. Dragon Age: Inquisition recognized by GLAAD

9. Former RI Secretary of State Fined $18K For 38 Studios Lobbying Case Antics

10. PSN hack settlement process begins

11. Nintendo does not reward risk taking – Adelman

12. Ubisoft Takes Heat for Deactivating Game Keys Over The Weekend 

+ Deactivated Ubisoft game keys were bought from EA’s Origin using stolen credit cards

13. Sony is now actually removing features from PlayStation Vita

14. EA holiday quarter exceeds expectations

15. Mobile-only gamers account for 20% of the market – NPD

16. ISIS and gaming: 5 students want to teach about surviving under the militants’ heel

17. Inside the Largest Virtual Psychology Lab in the World: Riot Games wants you to behave yourself when you play League of Legends, so it’s turned the game into a virtual lab

18. Athlete and Hollywood focused talent agency acquires e-Sports group

19. The Untold Story Of The Invention Of The Game Cartridge: How A Forgotten Company’s 1970s Technical Breakthrough Launched A Billion-Dollar Business And Helped Spawn A New Creative Medium

20. The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing

21. New digital library will preserve video game journalism for future generations

DIGITAL

22. Top 10 Internet Law Developments Of 2014

23. 2014: the year in review for Canadian copyright law

24. Zoë Keating vs YouTube: The End of an Artist’s Right to Choose Where Their Music Appears on The Internet.

25. Recording Industry Has ‘Virtually Eliminated Illegal File-Sharing’ In Norway — By Offering Better Products

26. DRM Destroys Value: Why Years Old, But DRM Free, Devices Sell For Twice The Price Of New Devices

27. The Entire Concept Of Intellectual Property Is Proof That Free Markets Aren’t Perfect

28. 4 Ways Copyright Law Actually Controls Your Whole Digital Life

29. College Claims Copyright On 16th Century Michelangelo Sculpture, Blocks 3D Printing Files

30. The Eureka Myth: How misunderstandings about creativity sustain a flawed copyright system. (Jessica Silbey)

31. It’s all over: Barrett Brown, formerly of Anonymous, sentenced to 63 months

+ US reporter jailed for linking to stolen data

32. Can robots break the law? (Andres Guadamuz)

33. DOJ Pays $134,000 To Settle Case Of DEA Agents Impersonating A Woman On Facebook

34. Your Private Data Isn’t Yours — Maybe It Never Was

35. Pointing the Finger: Who should be held liable when there’s a massive data breach at a big company?

36. The Internet of Things just got a watchdog: FTC issues official report: Thinking about security first could be a tall order for small companies.

37. Verizon’s Mobile ‘Supercookies’ Seen as Threat to Privacy

38. Netflix’s Viewing Data: How We Know Where You Are in House of Cards

39. Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads

+ CSE tracks millions of downloads daily: Snowden documents: Global sites for sharing movies, photos, music targeted in mass anti-terror surveillance

+ Canadian spy ops targeted global file-sharing services, drowned in Glee episodes: Canada’s version of the NSA targeted RapidShare, MegaUpload, and SendSpace.

40. Cops decry Waze traffic app as a “police stalker”

41. China Cracks Down On VPN Services After Censorship System ‘Upgrade’

42. Mass Surveillance Report (Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights)

43. We Need a Manhattan Project for Cyber Security

44. EFF’s Game Plan for Ending Global Mass Surveillance

45. Europe’s data protection laws are changing, are you prepared?

46. Turkish court orders Facebook to censor pages insulting Prophet Muhammed

+ Rather than face ban in Turkey, Facebook blocks “anti-Islamic” pages

47. The news website that’s keeping press freedom alive in Egypt: Mada Masr was formed just before military coup of 2013. Amid growing censorship, its staff have risked their lives to continue reporting. Can they stay true to their mission?

48. Deep Web Marketplaces

49. Coinbase Is Opening The First Regulated Bitcoin Exchange In The U.S.

50. Is the Digital Taxman Headed to Canada? (Michael Geist)

51. Hands-on: Microsoft’s HoloLens is flat-out magical

+ Project HoloLens: Our Exclusive Hands-On With Microsoft’s Holographic Goggles

52. How virtual reality ate the Sundance Film Festival: The future of independent film may not be film at all

+ Virtual reality: a new creative medium where the default state is belief

53. Feminist bloggers are not your therapists

54. Fighting Sexism In Silicon Valley

55. Bill Gates on Mobile Banking, Connecting the World and AI

56. This reality show confronts online trolls in real life

57. Exclusive: politicians are supporting Comcast’s TWC merger with letters ghostwritten by Comcast: Documents reveal the cozy relationship between lobbyists, officials, and the FCC

58. Back-up brains: The era of digital immortality

59. The Future of Medium: A critical look at the successes, challenges, and ambitions of this growing platform

60. Building an Internet Movement from the Bottom Up: The Internet is simply an effective tool for connecting people. Whether it becomes a force for good or evil is up to its users.

61. People can be induced to remember crimes they never committed: Implanting a false memory of committing a crime is easier than you think.

62. Could Virtual Reality Make Us Better People?: Scientists are using new immersive technology to have people virtually walk a mile in others shoes. Can we create empathy with just a silly headset?

63. From Science Fiction to Reality: The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence

CREATIVITY

64. The Trademark Lawyers For The Seattle Seahawks Have Apparently Lost Their Minds

65. Hockey Player Feels The Streisand Effect After Trying To Defensively Trademark His Nickname

66. Nike sued over Michael Jordan logo

67. We Should All Step Back from Security Journalism: I’ll Go First (Quinn Norton)

68. How Rap Genius and explainer sites are killing music journalism

69. Newsonomics: The U.S. Newspaper industry’s $1.4 Billion Money Hole

70. Bigger than Hollywood: Apple paid $10 billion to developers in calendar 2014.

jon

GAMES

1. EA Sued For Allegedly Violating Sports Statistics Patent

2.  UK Man Arrested For Christmas Day Attacks on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network

3. Hack on PS and Xbox attackers leaks DDoS customers’ plaintext passwords: Breached database shows DDoS-for-hire site received $11,000 in bitcoin.

+ A hacked DDoS-on-demand site offers a look into mind of “booter” users: Ars analyzes the database contents from LizardSquad’s hacked “stresser” site.

4. Man Dies After Three-Day Gaming Binge

5. Counter-Strike pro team accused of match fixing

6. Hatred gets Adults Only rating, making console, Steam release unlikely: ESRB gives violent game its most restrictive rating.

7. ‘Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number’ Refused Classification in Australia

+ ‘Hotline Miami 2’ Designer To Australian Gamer: ‘Just Pirate It’

+ Can you pirate your own video game?

8. Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz Launch Anti-Harassment Resource ‘Crash Override’

9. The right way to monetize kids?

10. Twitch starts free-to-use music library

11. Dailymotion launches game streaming service

12. PS4, Xbox One drive US industry to $13.1 billion in 2014 – NPD

13. Disney, Activision both claim landslide victory in toys-to-life category

14. Eutechnyx sells its NASCAR games business

15. GigaMedia faces NASDAQ delisting

16. PlayStation Now Review

17. Retail losing importance, finds GDC survey

18. Research: FPS Games Enhance Learning Capabilities

19. Hey, Videogames: Please Trick Me Into Thinking I’m Smart

20. Mario develops awareness, plays his own game: A team of researchers has programmed an AI into Nintendo’s Super Mario Advance, so that he can play his own game according to his feelings.

DIGITAL

21. Democracy in the digital era

22. Obama and Cameron’s ‘solutions’ for cybersecurity will make the internet worse: Drafting policies to imprison people who share an HBO GO password? Eliminating end-to-end data encryption? They can’t be serious

23. EFF Offers A Strong Rebuke Of President Obama’s Cybersecurity Proposals

24. Editors urge David Cameron to tighten police snooping rules: Prime minister asked to intervene to help protect journalists’ phones and communications records

25. Exclusive: Edward Snowden on Cyber Warfare

26. Facebook Banishes Hoaxes From The News Feed

27. Lindsay Tedds: Threats on social media are not victimless crimes

28. No Personal Jurisdiction Over Nasty Facebook Post–Burdick v. Superior Court

29. The age of Amazon is upon us: How one court battle reveals the growing threat of monopoly – Federal judges recently heard arguments in the latest case between Amazon and Apple. Here’s what you need to know

30. TV on your phone: Dish prevails in copyright fight with broadcasters: Judge says Dish Anywhere service is not Aereo. Fox “disappointed” with ruling

+ U.S. Dist. Ct. Reasons in Fox Broadcasting Company, Inc. v. Dish Network LLC, et al,

31. A year of significant change for Canadian IP law and practice

32. Copyright in Public Places

33. Can you copyright a tweet?

34. Artist Luc Tuymans Loses Plagiarism Case, Raises Questions

35. Pirate MEP Proposes Major Reform Of EU Copyright

36. The Limits of Copyright: Text and Data Mining

37. European Parliament Report Proposes Wide-Ranging Copyright Reform, Including Reduction Of EU Copyright Term

38. Steven Soderbergh Fought To Make Re-Editing Films Illegal; Now He’s Re-Editing Famous Films: from the the-rules-don’t-apply-to-me dept

+ Watch Steven Soderbergh’s Re-Edited Version of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey Free Online

39. Netflix sends cease and desist letter to virtual border-hopping service

40. Stream On?: How Canadian Law Views Online Streaming Video (Michael Geist)

41. Cory Doctorow and EFF aim to “eradicate DRM in our lifetime”: “It’s the difference between ‘Yes, master’ and ‘I CAN’T LET YOU DO THAT DAVE.”

42. Hockey Player Feels The Streisand Effect After Trying To Defensively Trademark His Nickname

43. The weird racial politics of online dating

44. 4chan founder Moot no longer running the internet’s collective id

45. Drugs, ‘murder,’ and Bitcoin: Your guide to the sensational Silk Road trial

46. Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifschitz found Crash Override: “Online anti-harassment task force” to provide support for targets of online hate

47.The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?

48. Net Fix: FCC chief on solving the Open Internet puzzle (Q&A)

49. Why Bitcoin is and isn’t like the Internet (Joichi Ito)

50. Why Almost Nobody Wants to Pay for the ‘Netflix of Magazines’

51. Google, Fidelity invest $1 billion in SpaceX and satellite Internet plan

52. The new era of hashtag activism

53. The A.I. Wars?: Why artificial intelligence may not revolutionize security and geopolitics—yet.

54. After The Social Web, Here Comes The Trust Web

55. MySpace Still Reaches 50 Million People Each Month

56. The Cathedral of Computation: We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy.

57. 2015 : What Do You Think About Machines That Think?

58. Among the Disrupted (Leon Wieseltier)

59. See the beautiful, nightmarish patent illustrations for a Google-funded augmented reality device

60. Why the modern world is bad for your brain: In an era of email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, we’re all required to do several things at once. But this constant multitasking is taking its toll.

61. The Museum of the Future Is Here: Some things belong in a museum. But at the Smithsonian’s recently reopened museum of design, a team has been rethinking what a thing is in the first place.

62. What platishers, like Medium, mean for unknown writers

CREATIVITY

63. Art Spiegelman Criticizes US Press for Not Publishing ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Cartoons

+ A week inside Charlie Hebdo: how the ‘survival issue’ was made

+ Flocking to Buy Charlie Hebdo, Citizens Signal Their Support of Free Speech

+ What the Fashion Industry Should Learn from ‘Je Suis Charlie’

+ Rex Murphy: We are not Charlie Hebdo

+ Lawyer surveillance after Charlie Hebdo

+ Can a city sue a TV channel?

+ U.S. Hacked North Korea Before North Korea Hacked U.S.

+ Microsoft complied with Charlie Hebdo probe, turning over data in 45 minutes: Company lawyer Brad Smith spoke in Brussels about government reactions to terror attack.

64. The Strange Rap-Jihadi Connection

65. France Arrests A Comedian For His Facebook Comments, Showing The Sham Of The West’s “Free Speech” Celebration

66. Why porn is exploding in the Middle East: Data reveal six of the top eight porn-searching countries are Muslim states. It’s not as surprising as it sounds

67. Waiting for Iran: Censorship is not always visible

68. New Snowden Leak Reveals GCHQ Collected Emails Of Journalists At NYT, WaPo, Guardian, BBC And Elsewhere

69. The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of “jaywalking”

70. Past Perfecting: Retouching is not merely servant to photography but is an artistic medium in its own right

71. Why Hollywood’s best directors are ditching movies for the Internet

72. Die Another Eh: What Does It Mean Now That James Bond Is In The Public Domain In Canada?

jon

GAMES

1. Spoiled Xmas Mornings: The Dark Side of the Online Future

2. Research Finds ‘Context Matters’ When Video Games Are Found To Influence Anti-Social Behavior

3. Violent Video Games Help Me Get Beyond My Violent Past

4. Microsoft clarifies position on external content usage

5. Developer: Publishers didn’t want a female lead in our video game – “We had other publishers telling us, ‘make it a male lead character.'”

6. Survey: 45% of the UK industry’s women feel gender is a “barrier”

7. Can a Video Game Help Rape Survivors?: An upcoming Oculus Rift experience tracks a character’s recovery following a sexual assault—aiming to enable empathy, even therapy, for survivors and outsiders alike.

8. Is ‘SimCity’ Homelessness a Bug or a Feature?

9. Award-winning composer faces union expulsion in game music fight

10. Researchers study benefits of exergaming

11. Gone Home: A Video Game as a Tool for Teaching Critical Thinking Skills

12. Computers Like To Sit In Front Of Computers And Play Games All Day, Too

DIGITAL

13. New Clues (Doc Searls & David Weinberger)

14. How Surveillance Causes Writers to Self-Censor (Bruce Schneier)

15. Code Is Law: But law is increasingly determining the ethics of code. (Jonathon Penney)

16. The Web Is the Real World: “Like an Uber for” became one of the most hackneyed phrases in tech this year. It’s also one of the most profound.

17. By 2025, the Definition of ‘Privacy’ Will Have Changed: In a new paper from Pew, experts warn that surveillance-free spaces are disappearing.

18. There’s a blockchain for that!: The code that secures Bitcoin could also power an alternate Internet. First, though, it has to work.

19. UK prime minister wants backdoors into messaging apps or he’ll ban them: In wake of Paris attacks, David Cameron targets encrypted communication services.

+ More Surveillance Won’t Protect Free Speech

20. Activist pulls off clever Wi-Fi honeypot to protest surveillance state: “All traffic that occurred via our wireless network has been logged.”

21. Zero for Conduct: On the surface, it sounds great for carriers to exempt popular apps from data charges. But it’s anti-competitive, patronizing, and counter-productive.

22. Rightscorp and BMG Exploiting Copyright Notice-and-Notice System: Citing False Legal Information in Payment Demands (Michael Geist)

+ Canada’s Copyright Notice Fiasco: Why Industry Minister James Moore Bears Some Responsibility (Michael Geist)

+ Canada’s copyright rules explained – A guide to Canada’s Internet piracy laws (with video)

23. Authors Guild Drops HathiTrust Case

+ Authors Guild Gives Up Trying To Sue Libraries For Digitally Scanning Book Collection

24. Copyright and Inequality (Lea Shaver)

25. White House Responds To Petition About Aaron Swartz By Saying Absolutely Nothing

+ Obama won’t fire Aaron Swartz’s federal prosecutors: White House “We the People” petitions demanding their removal lingered for two years.

+ Free Our Paywalled Court Documents: The Aaron Swartz Memorial PACER Cup Contest Announced

26. Sony Pictures CEO: call to Google got ‘The Interview’ out

27. Heads up, dear leader: Security hole found in North Korea’s home-grown OS: Misconfigured default permissions on files create a way to get root on Red Star OS.

28. What Does It Mean That James Bond’s In the Public Domain In Canada?

29. 10 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Intellectual Property Law

30. Apple’s ‘unwritten rules’ spark discontent for some app developers: Developers making use of new iOS features – even some shown off at the software’s launch – are finding their apps rejected by App Store staff

31. Decentralize All The Things!

32. Snowden Claims U.S. Policy Is Creating A Black Market For Digital Weapons

33. A Tarnished Uber Tries To Woo The Press

34. The digital bypass

35. President Obama Gets It: Net Neutrality Begins at Home

36. CEO Leslie Moonves Explains CBS’ Streaming Strategy: “I Don’t Care Where You Watch Our Shows”

37. The Town Without Wi-Fi: The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.

38. Game theorists crack poker: An ‘essentially unbeatable’ algorithm for the popular card game points to strategies for solving real-life problems without having complete information.

39. No Names, Many Histories: Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman wanted to write the definitive story of Anonymous. Her new book explains why that was an impossible goal.

40. The Hacker-Proof Wares In CES’s First ‘Personal Privacy’ Section

41. CES: How Silicon Valley Is ‘Democratizing’ Storytelling

42. I tried Sling TV at CES 2015, and now I’m cancelling cable

43. Spotify Now Has 15M Paying Users, 60M Overall Active Subscribers

44. Amazon, Netflix Win Big At The Golden Globes

45. Have you ever read the Apple Terms and Conditions? Me either. If this digitally-printed booklet doesn’t convince you to read at least part of it, I don’t know what will.

CREATIVITY

46. Salman Rushdie condemns attack on Charlie Hebdo

+ ‘Anonymous’ Member Calls For Revenge On Terrorists For Charlie Hebdo Massacre

+ Lost in translation: Charlie Hebdo, free speech and the unilingual left

+ Read the New Issue of Charlie Hebdo in English

+ Blasphemy and the law of fanatics

+Hitler’s Cartoon Problem and the Art of Controversy

+ These are the biggest hypocrites celebrating free speech today in Paris

+ Former ‘Onion’ editor: Freedom of speech cannot be killed

+ Terrorists Can’t Kill Charlie Hebdo‘s Ideas

+ A Modern History of Free-Speech Martyrs

47. International journalism: after a year of arrests and attacks, who would do it?

48. Stop sketching, little girl — those paintings are copyrighted!

jon

GAMES

1. EA Loses Appeal in Madden NFL 09 Lawsuit

+ Lawsuit Over Use Of Former NFL Players’ Likeness In Madden Moves Forward

2. Video Game Club 2014 – Entry 6: I’m no longer interested in worrying about whether other gamers think I’m sufficiently hardcore.

3. How imageboard culture shaped Gamergate: That tell-tale wedding of relentless hostility and ethical affectation is a peculiar youth subculture spilling out into the open web. Get ready for more of it.

4. 8chan user offers to “swat” GamerGate critic, cops sent to an old address: Post offers to swat forum-selected target; 20 police officers show up around midnight.

5. Video games and gun violence: A year after Sandy Hook

6. Racing video games may influence later behavior

7. Why PSN went down: Lizard Squad’s capabilities ‘far exceed typical DDoS groups’

+ Sony Offers Five Free Days of PlayStation Plus for PSN Christmas Outages

8. Dreaming Of Video Games – Researchers Investigate How Playing Games Affects The Sleeping Mind

9. PC Gamers Pick Their Top 10 Mods of 2014

10. Gaze Into The Future: Analyst Predictions for 2015

11. Over 2,300 MS-DOS games now completely free to play at Internet Archive

12. 18.5m PlayStation 4 units sold

DIGITAL

13. Sony Uses CES Keynote to Condemn Hackers

+ FBI: North Korea “got sloppy” with IP addresses in Sony hack

+ Sony hacking leads to U.S. sanctions against North Korea: Cites ‘provocations’ and threats against movie theatres

14. Canadian ISPs And VPNs Now Have To Alert Pirating Customers

15. Canadian Anti-Piracy Company Caught Using Unattributed And Paywalled Articles To Fill Its Blog

16. Google handled 345 million copyright takedowns in 2014: It’s a 75% year-over-year jump, and exponentially more than a few years ago.

17. Canadians That Access U.S. Netflix May Be in a Legal Grey Zone, But They Are Not Stealing (Michael Geist)

18. Top 10 Fair Use Cases of 2014

19. Bound by Law?: Free Comic Book Explains How Copyright Complicates Art

20. All Of These Works Should Be In The Public Domain, But Aren’t

21. Who’s the true enemy of internet freedom – China, Russia, or the US?: Beijing and Moscow are rightly chastised for restricting their citizens’ online access – but it’s the US that is now even more aggressive in asserting its digital sovereignty (Evgeny Morozov)

22. Inside Putin’s Information War: I spent years working for Russian channels. What I saw would terrify the West.

23. Netflix Helps You Trick Kids Into Thinking Midnight Came Early With An On-Demand Countdown

24. The Cybersecurity Tipping Point

25. Big Mother Is Watching You: If you keep your fitness-related New Year’s resolutions in 2015, it’ll likely be thanks to the new wave of devices and apps that have taken monitoring things like newborn sleep patterns and blood oxygenation from geek hobby to mass-market juggernaut. But what happens when companies have access to the most mundane details about our bodies?

26. Browsing in privacy mode? Super Cookies can track you anyway: New technique allows websites to bypass privacy mode unless users take special care.

27. Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo is a case study in the toxic nature of stack ranking

28. What Was Ello?

29. Children’s Digital Rights: A Priority – The unfolding global research and policy agenda for children’s digital rights is discussed

30. ‘I emailed a message between two brains’

31. Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer

32. The Trouble With Sweeping Questions About the Internet – Pundits and scholars too often phrase queries that miss the point: The transformative power of any technology relies first on underlying human forces.

33. Understanding Bitcoin And Its Disruption Through Its Roots

34. Virtual Reality’s Nagging Problem: It Makes Some People Sick

CONSTRAINTS

35. Novelists, poets, cartoonists respond to attacks on Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris

+ Freedom of Expression: International Publishers Association Issues Statement on Paris Attack

+ Obama condemns ‘cowardly, evil’ Paris attack, offers US help to pursue terrorists

36. Why cash and copyright are bad news for creativity (Dan Hunter)

37. Nielsen Music’s Year-End: Streaming Is Not Killing the Record Business

38. The Romantic Author and the Romance Writer: Resisting Gendered Concepts of Creativity (Rebecca Tushnet)

39. Creativity Is Collective: Personal experiences and character traits alone may not be enough to produce a prodigy. It takes a village

jon

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

GAMES

1. The FBI Is Investigating #GamerGate

+ The battle of Gamergate and the future of video games

2. Dark Souls Modder Gets Copyright Threat From Game Developer For Some Reason

3. Report: Dennis Rodman Threatens to Sue ‘Glorious Leader’ Makers

4. Nintendo Wins Over UltimatePointer in Patent Case

5. Halo anthology makers apologize, will give distressed fans free ODST

+ Microsoft Can’t Fix Its Halo: Master Chief Collection Fail

6. Sell it somewhere else: How retailer restrictions affect the game market 

7. Are comics a cautionary tale for game makers?

8. Buggy games deserve much harsher treatment

9. Former 38 Studios Board Member Gets Fined for Unregistered Lobbying Activity in Rhode Island

+ RI Secretary of State Loses in Court Over 38 Studios Lobbying Investigation

10. Confronting Videogame Torture, After The Cia’s Report

11. How Do You Teach Empathy? Harvard Pilots Game Simulation

12. Ubisoft Hides Waiver in Free Games Offer

13. Valve Is Now Preventing Users From Gifting Steam Games Across Countries: Steam region locks game gifting.

14. Don’t call it DRM: what’s Denuvo Anti-Tamper?

15. A practical guide to the EU’s new VAT rules, video games and digital content sales

+ VAT, Digital Content and Video Games

16. Knee-Jerk Rejection Of Pop Culture Like Video Games Isolates Conservatives

17. Beyond Tetris: a brief history of patriotic video gaming in Russia

18. Winning Isn’t Everything: I used to think that games would be the dominant medium of the 21st century. The reality? They’re too big, too complex, and too smart for that to be true.

DIGITAL

19. U.S. Officials Determine North Korea Is Behind Sony Hack: Reports

+ Sony Hackers Threaten “9/11-Style” Attack On Movie Theaters

+ Film of graphic novel Pyongyang killed in wake of Sony hacks

+ Sony Officially Cancels ‘The Interview’ Release Following Hacker Threats

+ Sony Goes One Ridiculous Step Further: Threatens To Sue Twitter Over Leaked Email Screenshots

+ Seth Rogen And The Ridiculous War Of 2014: In the gutless cancelation of The Interview release, Seth Rogen and James Franco emerge the lone heroes.

+ Obama thinks Sony “made a mistake” pulling The Interview after hack: The president also promised a “proportional response” to North Korea.

+ North Korea loses Internet days after Barack Obama vows revenge over Sony hacks

+ Cyberwar on North Korea Could Be Illegal: Someone knocked the Hermit Kingdom offline. If it was the United States, the operation will test the bounds of international law.

+ Sony To Allow Screenings Of ‘The Interview’ On Christmas After All

+ The Interview to be streamed online through YouTube, Xbox Video, Google Play

+ How Tim League, George R. R. Martin & Indie Cinemas Helped Uncancel ‘The Interview’

+ Let the games begin: first Sony class action lawsuit filed over data breach

20. Facebook Page Goes Dark, Angering Russia Dissidents

21. Garcia v. Google 9th Circuit en banc video

22. Hollywood v. Goliath: Inside the aggressive studio effort to bring Google to heel – Leaked Sony e-mails show states’ top lawyers and studios are closer than ever.

+ Google GC Calls Out MPAA ‘Secret’ SOPA Campaign

+ Google SUES Jim Hood — Mississippi Attorney General Claiming Ties To MPAA – Frontline Desk

+ Mississippi AG backs off Google investigation pushed by MPAA

23. Canada Preps Launch Of An Actually Mostly Sensible ISP Copyright Warning System

+ Notice the Difference? New Canadian Internet Copyright Rules for ISPs Set to Launch

24. Judge: It’s OK for cops to create fake Instagram accounts

25. Jury finds for Apple in iTunes case, throws out billion-dollar lawsuit: After just a few hours of deliberation, jury nukes a 10-year antitrust case.

26. “Shadowy” anti-net neutrality group flooded FCC with comments 

CONSTRAINTS

27. First Amendment Bars School Discipline For Student’s Rap Video About School Coaches

28. Flickr removes CC-licensed photos from Wall Art program

29. Judge Floats ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ as Libel Remedy

30. Inside the turnaround of Machinima

31.Cyberwar and Cyberterror — New and Unwelcome Companions in Publishing and Culture

jon

GAMES

1. Court Ruling: EA’s Anti-Piracy Software Is Patent Infringing

2. Angry Birds And The Bizarre World Of International Basketball Corruption

3. Destiny players banned for use of modded consoles

4. Valve Removes ‘Hatred’ From Steam Greenlight

+ Update: Valve returns Hatred to Greenlight after removal

5. An Open Letter To Tim Cook About Game Censorship

+ Papers, Please on iPad has nudity reinstated: Apple lifts its censorship on the game’s body scanning feature

6. Custom games being used to treat psychopaths

7. Microsoft tells J.S. Joust devs their game is “NOT possible” on Windows: PlayStation Move-enabled game only on Mac and Linux for now, will be open sourced.

8. The latest games trademark controversy: S.T.A.L.K.E.R and STALKER

9. Consumer Reports Reveals Its Top Five Most Violent Games / Top Five Games For Kids Lists

10. Acceptable censorship?: Why are people so outraged about retailers pulling Grand Theft Auto V when the industry condones far more damaging censorship as a matter of routine?

+ Grand Theft Auto 5, Australian culture, and how the American press misses the point

11. Why does gender balance matter in the games industry?

+ GamerGate’s silver lining

12. Genre and Game Studies: Toward a Critical Approach to Video Game Genres (Thomas Apperley)

13. Fan-Made Pokémon Fighting Game Looks Better Than The Official One

14. Mobile gaming installed base tops 1 billion – IDC

15. How Pop Culture Made “Flappy Bird” An Overnight Success

16. France gets EU approval to bolster tax breaks for game developers

17. The Sporting Stars of the Future Play ‘Halo,’ Not Soccer

18. The Best Video Games of 2014

DIGITAL

19. Is Every Orc an Author? On Rehearing, Judges Challenge 5-Second Copyright in Garcia v. Google

20. Internet Monitor 2014: Reflections on the Digital World: Platforms, Policy, Privacy, and Public Discourse (Berkman Center for Internet & Society)

21. Supreme Court’s Privacy Streak Comes To End: Split Court Affirms Legality of Warrantless Phone Searches Incident to Arrest (Michael Geist)

22. Anonymous-Tied Sentencing Details Still in Dark

23. Over 700 Million People Taking Steps to Avoid NSA Surveillance (Bruce Schneier)

24. Government documents reveal telecom providers envision surveillance-ready networks: Geist

25. Will Privacy Be 2015’s Killer App?

26. The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality

27. From net neutrality to copyright: media law trends for 2015: The battle over how to protect an open internet, new copyright exceptions and the increasing influence of the European commission are just a few trends to monitor next year 

28. When Facial Recognition Software Becomes the Good Guy: Facebook envisions AI that could stop you from uploading embarrassing pictures.

29. Google To Close Google News In Spain On December 16 In Response To New Law

+ Spanish Newspapers Want Google News Back

30. Ukrainian Hackers Leak Russian Interior Ministry Docs with ‘Evidence’ of Russian Invasion

31. Google Allegedly Closing Down Russian Engineering Office In Response To Russian Data Laws

32. Leaked Emails Reveal MPAA Plans To Pay Elected Officials To Attack Google

+ Project Goliath: Inside Hollywood’s secret war against Google

33. “Shadowy” anti-net neutrality group flooded FCC with comments: Form letter campaign makes it appear Americans don’t support net neutrality.

34. The Messy Media Ethics Behind The Sony Hacks: The gray area where the leaked information resides — between public and private, prurient and illuminating — might not be the exception, but the new normal.

+ No Gray Area: It’s Definitely Not OK to Publish Emails From the Sony Hack: A look at the media’s strategy of relying on criminals to do their reporting for them.

+ Sony Fires Off Letter To Press Outlets Demanding They Cease Publication Of And Destroy Any ‘Stolen Information’

+ Can Sony Get Around First Amendment to Sue the Media Over the Hack? (Analysis)

35. Now at the Sands Casino: An Iranian Hacker in Every Server

36. Operation Socialist: The Inside Story Of How British Spies Hacked Belgium’s Largest Telco

37. World Wide Web Foundation: It’s Time The Internet Became a Basic Human Right

38. An Open Letter to Everyone Involved in the Tor Fight: And a Few People Who Aren’t (Quinn Norton)

39. Spotify vs Uber: A case study on why it’s sometimes better not to be (a jerk)

40. Monkey Selfie Back In The News: Photographer Threatens Copyright Experts With His Confused Understanding Of Copyright

41. Do Artifacts Have Ethics?

CONSTRAINTS

42. Eric Holder Blinks: Won’t Force Reporter James Risen To Reveal Source (Or Send Him To Jail)

43. The insane history of how American paranoia ruined and censored comic books

44. Georgia Tech Research Finds Copyright Confusion has ‘Chilling Effects’ in Online Creative Publishing

45. Art is a business – and, yes, artists have to make difficult, honest business decisions: It’s tough enough to make a living when we do what we love. Quit being so critical of artists who are transparent about the money side (Amanda Palmer)

46. Why the Future Will be Made by Creators, Not Consumers

47. Grappling With the ‘Culture of Free’ in Napster’s Aftermath

48. U.S. TV Viewing Down Sharply In Past Year: Nielsen

49. How YouTube MCNs are Conquering Hollywood

50. You Can’t Make a Living: Digital Media, the End of TV’s Golden Age, and the Death Scene of the American Playwright

51. Libraries Face Off Against Publishers and the European Union at WIPO

52. Uber imposes 4X surge pricing in wake of Sydney crisis, then free rides: At first, firm charged A$100 minimum during hostage crisis, then gave refunds.

53. Inside the Collapse of The New Republic

54. Sowing Mayhem, One Click at a Time

55. Digital giants get bigger at the expense of the small blog sites: The growth of companies such as BuzzFeed, Gawker, Mashable and Vice Media could crush independent journalistic enterprise

56. The New Hampshire Rebellion: I met Larry Lessig in an empty train, one cold evening of November 2013, somewhere between Marseille and Paris. He had boarded before me and was trying to force the door into the sitting compartment

jon

GAMES

1. Activision Prevails in ‘Angry Monkey’ Military Patch Lawsuit

2. General George Patton’s rights holders go to war with video game maker: Case follows similar infringement gaming suits by Lindsay Lohan, Manuel Noriega.

3. Kmart Australia Joins Target Australia in Pulling ‘GTA V’ From Stores Shelves

+ Take-Two: Don’t like GTA? Don’t buy it

4. Why does gender balance matter in the games industry?

5. AbleGamers’ Weird Weekend of Porn, Charity, DDoS Attacks, and GamerGate

6. Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades: Still on track for the 2016 Angry Birds movie.

7. Microsoft Apologizes For Late Payments to Xbox Live Indie Game Developers

8. Microsoft: Will “work on making amends” for Street Fighter exclusivity

9. Half-Life 2 Is Now A Strategy Game. Thanks, Modders

10. New 3DS firmware breaks recently released “Ninjhax” homebrew exploit: Hackers urge users not to update if they want to run unsigned code.

11. Les Simerables: SimCity isn’t a sandbox. Its rules reflect the neoliberal common sense of today’s urban planning.

12. Mobile gaming overtakes PC in Southeast Asia – Report

13. “It will be hard to tell the difference between what’s real and what’s virtual”

14, Samsung shares horrifying laundry list of potential Gear VR risks: Users should take breaks every 30 minutes “even if you do not think you need it.”

15. Twitch acquiring eSports agency GoodGame

16. A Brief History of Games Journalism: Over the past four decades, games journalism has undergone some major evolutions. We look at how it’s changed over the years.

17. The 20 Years When Games Grew Up

18. On Like Donkey Kong: Super Nintendo vs Hip-Hop: Famed video game composer David Wise reacts to being sampled by Drake and Childish Gambino

19. Secret Habitat Explores The Phenomena Of Procedural Art

20. British Tory MP Caught Playing ‘Candy Crush Saga’ During Important Hearing

21. Playing With My Son: An experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting

22. ‘Elegy for a Dead World’ Now Available On Steam

23. Obituary: Ralph Baer – Electronics pioneer who fathered the console passes away

DIGITAL

24. Apple on trial: Company execs say DRM was forced on them by record labels

+ Apple deleted music from users’ iPods purchased from rivals, court told: Apple scanned for music purchased from rival services such as Amazon and forced users to delete all music from their iPods, it is claimed

25. DirecTV contract punishes HBO if streaming-only gets too popular, sources say: It seems the TV provider has been planning for HBO’s Web-only service for a while.

26. Negotiating Away Innovation: Dish Agrees To Kill Autohop To End TV Blackouts

27. Comcast Sued Over Router Update That Makes Your Wi-Fi Hotspot Public, Ignores Your Opt-Out Preferences

28. AT&T still throttles “unlimited data”—even when network not congested: Half-megabit speeds force customers to abandon unlimited data.

29. Internet Provider Sonic’s CEO: Title II Is Only A Regulatory Burden If You’re Doing Something Bad

30. Is Livestreaming the Future of Media, or the Future of Activism?: It might be both. A report from Ferguson, and your laptop screen.

31. SCC holds disclosure of private communications engages constitutional rights

32. Canadian Law Enforcement Agency Dropping Cases Rather Than Deal With New Warrant Requirements For ISP Subscriber Info

33. The unstoppable rise of the global surveillance profiteers

34. All cameras are police cameras

35. NSA spies on carriers to break call encryption, report suggests

+ NSA warrantless bulk phone metadata spying continues unabated: Metadata snooping re-authorized a fourth time despite Obama’s reform pledge.

+ Idaho mom’s suit over NSA database gets a cool reception from appeals court

+ Secretive UK Court That Approves Of GCHQ Surveillance Says That GCHQ Surveillance Doesn’t Violate Human Rights

36. The System Isn’t Going to Fix Itself—It’s Time for Us to Police the Police

37. Microsoft tells US: The world’s servers are not yours for the taking – Redmond says the US would be aghast if a foreign government behaved as it does.

38. BitTorrent is building a decentralized web browser

39. The World Cracks Down on the Internet

+ China cracks down on unofficial fan groups who subtitle hit American TV shows

+ Who runs the Internet?: The Internet as we know it has come under threat. As governments and large corporations poise themselves to take control, the question is: What can we as individual users do?

40. Report: Iran Developing System To ID Any Internet User

41. Personal data protection is a ‘fundamental right’ in Europe

42. ‘Right to be forgotten’ on the Internet gains traction in Japan

43. Class Action Law Suits for Privacy Breaches in Canada: A Useful Tool in a Half-Full Toolbox? (Teresa Scassa)

44. A Feminist Critique of Silicon Valley: Shanley Kane challenges the assumptions and practices of the tech industry.

45. Wanted: a tinkerer’s charter – Users should be allowed to fiddle with the way consumer products work without suffering penalties from governments or sanctions from manufacturers (The Economist)

46. Copyright Implications of a “Right to be Forgotten”? Or How to Take-Down the Internet Archive.

47. Chasing Clicks: Metrics should support a strategy, not be a strategy

48. Implanted Future: How Bodyhacking Could Become Commonplace

49. Uber Banned In New Delhi In Latest Twist Following Alleged Passenger Rape

+ Uber Faces Legal Action In India Following Arrest Of Rape Suspect (Note terms of service discussion)

+ More Woe For Uber As Ride Sharing Service UberPop Ban Upheld In The Netherlands

+ Portland Sues Uber

+ Uber sued by SF and LA, shut down in Spain and Thailand – Prosecutors: Uber doesn’t even fingerprint its drivers, claims high safety mark.

50. We Can’t Trust Uber (Zeynep Tufekci & Brayden King)

51. Why Uber’s ‘god view’ is creepy (Bruce Schneier)

52. With bullying app Secret on life support, investors learn the risk of investing in (jerks)

53. Readings in Big Data Ethics – Updated List (Santa Clara University)

CONSTRAINTS

54. Is Our Art Equal to the Challenges of Our Times?

55. YouTube shows video creators what copyright restrictions their audio will face: Audio Library will now include information about tracks’ playability, monetization.

56. Authors Guild Argues That Google Books Should Be Infringing Because Aaron Swartz

57. Staffers Resign En Masse At ‘The New Republic’ Amid Planned Changes

+ Facebook Prince Purges The New Republic: Inside the Destruction of a 100-Year-Old Magazine

58. Twitter has made the 24-hour news cycle into a 2-hour news cycle

59. Everything Rolling Stone did wrong: How it should have protected Jackie from getting torn apart by trolls – Finally, the magazine stops blaming Jackie and starts blaming itself

60. The newsonomics of the newly quantified, gamified news reader

61. For decades, the idea of a language instinct has dominated linguistics. It is simple, powerful and completely wrong

62. Radio-Free Syria

63. This is Your Brain on Jazz Improvisation: The Neuroscience of Creativity

jon

GAMES

1. Nintendo and Philips settle patent dispute

2. France’s Health and Safety body says kids shouldn’t use 3D: Nintendo responds, points to existing usage recommendations

3. Nintendo Patents Game Boy Emulation For Use In Mobile Devices, In-Flight Entertainment

4. Target Australia removes GTA V from sale following petition

5. Let’s Talk About Ethics In Games Journalism! (Zoe Quinn)

+ Actually, It’s About…

+ The Gaming Industry’s Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started

+ New Feminist Frequency Video Tackles Male Privilege in Gaming

+ Video Game Reviewer Is Contacting the Mothers of Her Online Harassers

6. The Rise of Game Neuroeconomics

7. Valve launches Steam Broadcasting

8. EA not looking for big acquisitions

9. Xbox’s Japan chief resigns after bleak Xbox One sales

10. Berlin’s Ad2games raises $9 million

11. Sony backs away from FIFA sponsorship

12. ‘I Am Bread’ Is the Weirdest Video Game of 2014

13. Designing an Alien Alphabet

14. Tate Worlds: Art Reimagined for Minecraft

DIGITAL

15. The Uncertain Scope of the Public Performance Right after Aereo (Matthew Sag)

16. What Happens When Spies Can Eavesdrop on Any Conversation?

17. EU Data Protection Authority Adopts Guidelines On The Implementation Of The Right To Be Forgotten

18. Enter the Matrix: The rise of brain-computer interfaces

19. Is Internet Addiction a Real Thing?

20. Putting out a fire: inappropriate tweets result in unpaid suspension for firefighter

21. “Net Neutrality”:Why are the Bad Guys So Much Better at Naming Things?

+ AT&T Has To Walk Back Its Empty Bluff About Freezing Fiber Deployment Because Of Title II

+ A World Without Net Neutrality Already Exists

22. Media and Internet Concentration in Canada, 1984-2013

23. Don’t Blame Social Media for Ferguson’s Troubles: The Internet is just one more way that, on nights like Monday night, the whole world is watching.

CONSTRAINTS

24. Free Speech, Facebook and Gangsta Rap (Noah Feldman)

+ Supreme Court Chief Justice Quotes Eminem in Weighing What’s a ‘True Threat’ Online

25. How Medium is trying to bring back the web we lost

26. Social media told to simplify terms and conditions

27. The fight to get Google to pay for news continues in Europe: The battle over snippets and links, fought country to country across the continent, is moving up to the continental level.

28. TV 3.0 is already here

29. China to Send Filmmakers to Countryside for “Ideological Training”

+ No Joke: China’s Broadcasting Authority Bans Puns And Wordplay

jon

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

GAMES

1. Ubisoft’s Sneaky Scheme to Keep You From Seeing Bad Reviews

+ 3 Reasons Why Video Game Review Embargoes Are Particularly Anti-Consumer

+ Why didn’t Ubisoft do the right thing and delay Assassin’s Creed Unity?

2. No Dragon Age: Inquisition for India as EA pulls RPG: Local obscenity laws to blame, says EA

3. Assassin’s Creed Unity Criticized By Former French Politician

4. Nexon drops developer Robotoki’s first game after studio drops free-to-play model

5. Sony’s Layden: Harassment “completely unacceptable”

6. We Are Not Jack Thompson’ Song Delivers A Positive Message To All Gamers

+ Intel Resumes Ad Campaign With Gamasutra

+ Victims Of Online Threats Say Perpetrators Aren’t Being Caught

+ Rage Against GamerGate’s Hate Machine

+ The Anita Sarkeesian Hater That Everyone Hates

+ Grand Theft Auto V’s First-Person Sex With a Prostitute

+ Dragon Age: Inquisition’s women, and the remarkable ordinary

7. Sweden looking to label games that promote gender equality

8. ‘Final Fantasy XIV’ Servers Targeted by Ongoing DDoS Attacks

9. Dev who threatened Gabe Newell has returned to Code Avarice

10. Breaking the lock: Why all game content should be unlocked from the outset – It’s past time developers stop restricting when and how we play their games.

11. Early Access popularity growing, but only 25% have released as a full game

12. PETA Launching Animal Friendly ‘Minecraft’ Server This Weekend

13. Gumi to file IPO at $890 million valuation

14. Big Fish Games to be acquired for $485 million

15. Good Game: The rise of the professional cyber athlete.

16. Atari landfill cartridges sell for up to $1,500 each at auction: City raises $36,000 selling nearly 100 trashed cartridges

17. 8-Bit Philosophy: Plato, Sartre, Derrida & Other Thinkers Explained With Vintage Video Games

DIGITAL

18. Court agrees that Google’s search results qualify as free speech: Website CoastNews had its complaint tossed; must pay attorney’s fees to Google.

19. French ‘right to be forgotten’ decision takes link removal beyond Europe

20. Appeals Court Rules in Favor of Anonymous Speech in California Prop. 35 Case

21. Unsealed Filing Shows DOJ Misled Appeals Court About National Security Letter Gag Orders

22. Americans Want More Privacy from Companies and Government

23. Mobile App Privacy Practices: The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Issues Tips For Communicating Privacy Practices to App Users

24. Computer espionage attacks on human rights, civil liberties groups: Citizen Lab releases new report

25. Condemnation mounts against ISP that sabotaged users’ e-mail encryption: Researchers say AT&T subsidiary thwarted STARTTLS protection, sent e-mail in clear.

26. Hotel charges couple’s credit card $156 for negative Trip Advisor review: Terms of service for “Dirty rotten stinking hovel” authorizes bad-review fines.

27. FCC calls AT&T’s fiber bluff, demands detailed construction plans: AT&T claims net neutrality forced it to “pause” fiber builds it never started.

+ The troubling truth behind these anti-net neutrality op-ed writers

+ Net Neutrality is sooo much more than access to the “tubes”… (danah boyd)

28. The Cable Model and The Internet Model

29. 6 links that will show you what Google knows about you

30. Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt On Journalists

+ The moment I learned just how far Uber will go to silence journalists and attack women

+ Uber’s Moral Compass Needs Recalibration

+ The Immaturity and Arrogance of Uber

+ Hear Sarah Lacy respond to Uber exec’s proposed million dollar smear campaign against her

31. LinkedIn Can’t Shake Publicity Rights Claims Based on Reminder Emails

32. Amazon and Hachette resolve dispute with multi-year agreement: Agreement ends a bitter months-long dispute that saw NYT op-eds, Colbert segments.

33. When Fitbit Is the Expert Witness: An upcoming court case will use fitness-tracking data to try and prove a plaintiff’s claim, bringing us one step closer to the new age of quantified self incrimination.

34. Virtual Reality Aims for the Mobile Phone:

35. A smartphone-based virtual reality headset from Samsung and Oculus VR could make the technology more accessible, but it also demonstrates a new set of challenges.

36. How Individual Identity Influences The Way Audiences Share [Survey Data]

37. IBM’s Watson Can Now Debate Its Opponents

38. Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet”

CONSTRAINTS

39. Art In A Time Of Surveillance

40. Music Critics See Their Role and Influence Waning in The Era of Digital Music

41. How Garth Brooks took on the internet – and lost: The poor sales of his comeback album Man Against Machine show that taking a stand against the modern music business only works if you’re Taylor Swift

jon

GAMES

1. Glu Mobile sues Hothead over “rip off” Kill Shot

+ Deer Hunter Vs. Killshot: Why Specific Expression Matters More Than Similar Shooter-Genre Staples

2. Blizzard president Mike Morhaime condemns hate and harassment in gaming at BlizzCon keynote

+ When Gamergate Targets You: Who The Hell Keeps Calling Me?

+ Actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism (meme collection)

3. Research: No Correlation Between ‘Violent Media Consumption’ and ‘Societal Violence’

4. Bungie exec swatted

5. Manuel Noriega Loses Right of Publicity Suit Against Activision

6. Telepathy is now possible using current technology

7. Game industry growing four times faster than US economy – ESA

8. Average age of mobile gamer drops seven years as kids and teens grab smartphones

9. Report: Just 6% of US mobile gamers provide 51% of revenue

10. Zynga loses another $57 million in Q3

11. Electronic Arts’ Ceo On Transforming The “Worst Company In The U.S.”

12. Why We Should Pay Attention To Candy Crush Saga & Other Casual Games

13. How ESports Influenced Activision’s Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

14. Atari gets into real-money gaming

15. gumi expands into Canada with new Vancouver office

16. Witcher 3 dev CD Projekt turns cluster-migraine-suffering fan into NPC

17. The Oculus Rift makes Elite: Dangerous amazing—and impossible to describe: The worst part about an awesome VR experience is you can’t share it with pix or video.

18. Football Manager: the pleasures and pitfalls of playing the world’s most addictive video game – Rupert Hawksley pays tribute to Football Manager, the video game so engrossing it has been cited in 35 divorce cases

19. The Capitalism of Late Archaeology: Alamogordo’s Atari Games on Ebay

DIGITAL

20. Aereo’s saga signals a chilling effect for innovation

21. Computer Scientists, Legal Experts Explain To Supreme Court Why APIs Are Not Copyrightable

22. Takedown of anti-Muslim YouTube video gets appeals court rehearing: Decision allows subjects of news coverage to veto “unflattering broadcasts.”

23. Law is Code: A Software Engineering Approach to Analyzing the United States Code

24. FTC Takes First Action Against Patent Trolls For Deceptive Sales, Phony Legal Threats

25. Will the FCC ruin the Internet?

+ President Obama Calls For A Free And Open Internet, Wants It Reclassified As A Utility

+ President Obama Offers Full-Throated Endorsement of Net Neutrality Rules and Enforcement

+ Anti Net Neutrality Crowd Reaches Deep For The Craziest Possible Response To President Obama’s Call For Real Net Neutrality Rules

26. Net Neutrality and Netflix Taxes: The Tension Between Government and Regulatory Agencies on Digital Policy (Michael Geist)

27. Americans know about digital snooping but can’t stop it, survey finds: 91 percent say we’ve “lost control over how personal information is collected.”

28. Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era (Pew Research Internet Project)

29. State-sponsored hackers target human rights groups, study says

30. Tor Developers, Privacy Wonks Desperately Searching To Figure Out How The Feds Broke Tor To Find Hidden Servers

31. Berlin’s digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA

32. Islamic Extremists Use YouTube’s Automated Copyright Dispute Process To Access Critics’ Personal Data

33. What the Law Can (and Can’t) Do About Online Harassment (Marlisse Silver Sweeney)

34. Twitter Launches New Tool That Lets Women Report Harassment

+ Twitter calls on a women’s advocacy group to collect data on harassment

+ If Twitter Won’t Handle Its Massive Harassment Problem, These Women Will

35. Not All Nerds: By imagining nerds as a race of their own, Silicon Valley tries to disguise its white supremacy.

36. Navigating Legal Issues in the Twittersphere

37. We Won’t Have an Internet Sales Tax Any Time Soon

38. Computer with human-like learning will program itself

CONSTRAINTS

39. The Era Of TV’s Media Dominance Will Come To An End In 2016 — Here’s The Evidence

+ TV Has An Advertising Problem — Here Comes The Blame Game: Third-quarter earnings from the largest television network owners show a tepid advertising environment. Blame Nielsen. Or Ebola. Or something.

40. Shaking off Spotify is easy for Taylor Swift; for everyone else, it’s complicated

+ If You’re Going To Complain About Spotify Payments, At Least Understand A Little Economics First

jon