Posts

GAMES

1. New York sues Time Warner over throttled League of Legends speeds
2. Elite: Dangerous pen-and-paper RPG stymied by intellectual property dispute – Complaint alleges infringement of 1984 Elite game’s copyright.
3. Prosecutors Score a Goal in FIFA 17 Gambling Case
4. Steve Bannon sunk $60M of Goldman Sachs’ money into a failed World of Warcraft goldfarming scheme
5. Trump’s Campaign CEO’s Little Known World of Warcraft Career
6. Political chaos threatens the whole games business: From Trump to Brexit to the rise of anti-globalisation rhetoric, the conditions that allow games companies to do business are under attack
7. ESA calls Trump’s immigration stance “reckless and misinformed”: US industry trade group promises vigilance against “misguided efforts that dim our frontiers”
8. “Any pressure on visas getting into the US is worrisome” – Valve: Erik Johnson and Gabe Newell explain how Trump’s immigration policies could prompt The International to be moved out of the country
9. Dozens of game makers contribute games to fight Trump on immigration: Freedom Bundle offers dozens of games, e-books for $30 donation to worthy causes.
10. The long and troubled history of Apocalypse Now, the video game
11. The Strong Museum seeks to explore the impact women have had on game dev
12. Games in the media in 2016 – Overwatch comes out on top
13. US games industry adds $11.7 billion to GDP – ESA
14. Trade group’s economic impact report says: gaming supports more than 220,000 jobs, average compensation tops $97,000 a year
15. eSports market to hit $696 million this year – Report: Newzoo projects total eSports market to reach $1.5 billion by 2020, with brand sponsorship and advertising leading the way
16. Valve’s Gabe Newell: VR could “turn out to be a complete failure”: Rare interview tempers long-term optimism with tech/content/price realism.
17. A Sliver Of The Future: How Virtual Reality Pushes Esports’ Boundaries
18. EA fines Madden Bowl winner: Tournament winner loses $3,000 for posting offensive tweets despite warnings from publisher
19. Madden Bowl winner represents latest black eye for EA Sports and eSports
20. NBA 2K eLeague To Debut As First eSports League Operated By U.S. Pro Sports League
21. NBA and Take-Two form NBA 2K eSports League
22. The NBA Announces Plan To Start Its Own eSports NBA League
23. NBA 2K’s ELeague Could Change The Competitive Gaming Scene
24. Gabe Newell explains Valve’s budgeting process: there is none
25. Virtual Reality, Facebook, and a Costly Non-Disclosure Agreement
26. Facebook removing 200 Oculus Rift demo units from Best Buy stores
27. Virtual Reality Becomes a $500 Million Actual Reality for Facebook
28. Ubisoft’s 3rd quarter saw a rise in engagement, but a decrease in sales
29. Activision Blizzard posts big sales, but Call of Duty fails to connect with fans
30. Sony discontinues PlayStation Now on PS3, Vita, and most other devices
31. Sony patents Vive-like tracking system, hints at wireless PSVR: Application shows Lighthouse-style set-up to counteract current light interference
32. Kabam cuts Beijing team: Legacy of Zeus developers let go as company narrows list of key assets left to sell
33. Counterpoint: As Denuvo Lauds Its Weeks-Long Control, 20 Year Old Game Still Selling Due To Its Modding Community
34. Evolving Steam
35. Steam kills Greenlight: Steam Direct will have devs pay an application fee for each game “to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline”
36. Valve says goodbye to Steam Greenlight, hello to “Direct” publishing: Soon, anyone with paperwork and a fee payment will be able to sell on Steam.
37. Konami’s profits up 70% in nine-month financials
38. Activision Publishing cuts staff: Disappointing year prompts layoffs at studios including Infinity Ward and Beenox
39. The Quest for the First FDA-Approved Video Game
40. How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES – Or: How to stream video using 1.2 million console button presses per second.
41. ASA Ruling on Queens Solitaire Games
42. Why won’t the games industry share its digital data?: NPD, SuperData and Steam Spy offer up their thoughts

DIGITAL

1. A battle rages for the future of the Web: Should the WWW be locked down with DRM? Tim Berners-Lee needs to decide, and soon.
2. Maker Studios Braces for More Layoffs as Disney Plans to Shrink Creator Network
3. Maker Studios Reportedly Slashing Its Creator Network Of “Thousands” To Just 300
4. PewDiePie dropped by Maker & YouTube ad platform over antisemitic content: PewDiePie calls out “old school media” for attempt to “decrease my influence and my economic worth”
5. YouTube Cancels PewDiePie Show After Disney Cuts Ties With Star Over Anti-Semitic Posts
6. When did fascism become so cool? PewDiePie’s antics are the thin end of the wedge: A white guy with a net worth of $124m making poor brown people hold up a sign calling for genocide is pure banter, isn’t it?
7. Pewdiepie Dropped By Disney Following Offensive Video Content
8. Disney drops YouTube star PewDiePie over anti-Semitic content
9. PewDiePie Incident Means More Scrutiny for Influencers: But ad buyers doubt marketers will pull budgets from all YouTube influencers
10. How Wikipedia Is Cultivating an Army of Fact Checkers to Battle Fake News: The online encyclopedia has been fact checking the Internet for more than 15 years. Now it wants to bring its skeptical eye to the masses.
11. Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle: Oracle insinuates Google was “a plagiarist” that committed “classic unfair use.”
12. Oracle Files Its Opening Brief As It Tries (Again) To Overturn Google’s Fair Use Win On Java APIs
13. Authors Alliance Amicus Brief Supports Fair Use Defense In Georgia State Case
14. Wikipedia bans Daily Mail for “poor fact checking, sensationalism, flat-out fabrication”: Daily Mail is too unreliable and can’t be used as a source, Wikipedia editors rule.
15. Handful of “highly toxic” Wikipedia editors cause 9% of abuse on the site: New study of Wikipedia comments reveals most attackers aren’t anonymous.
16. PayPal Kills Canadian Paper’s Submission To Media Awards Because Article Had Word ‘Syrian’ In The Title
17. Shopify’s Breitbart Fight Proves It: These Days, Tech Has to Take a Side
18. Lawsuit alleges Magic Leap workplace is ‘misogynistic,’ ‘dysfunctional’
19. Hedge funds reportedly want to buy Mt. Gox bankruptcy claims: A US lawyer has even set up a website to make this process easier.
20. Women filmed by Ottawa ‘pick-up artist’ may have no legal remedy
21. Maniac Killers of the Bangalore IT Department: Why is India obsessed with crimes committed by software engineers?
22. First Amendment Protects Google’s De-Indexing of “Pure Spam” Websites–e-ventures v. Google (Eric Goldman)
23. Internet firms’ legal immunity is under threat: Platforms have benefited greatly from special legal and regulatory treatment
24. UK Search Engines Will Sign Up To A ‘Voluntary’ Code On Piracy — Or Face The Consequences
25. Is the Internet a wilderness of commodity news?
26. Can Snapchat really save news? More than half of users don’t follow outlets on the platform
27. Don’t fear artificial intelligence: experts
28. Artificial Intelligence forges ahead of the law
29. It’s not as simple as man versus machine. (Sara Watson)
30. Netflix Cheating Is Common, But Is It Really All That Bad?: Almost half of couples that binge-watch together have been disloyal
31. Patent Troll Sues Netflix, Soundcloud, Vimeo And More For Allowing Offline Viewing
32. I Helped Create the Milo Trolling Playbook. You Should Stop Playing Right Into It.
33. NHL’s First Games In Live VR To Be Seen By Canadians With Headsets Found In Cases Of Beer
34. Manchester United set to launch worldwide premium streaming app costing up to £4.99 per month with services in over 160 countries
35. 200 Coders and Hackers United to Save NASA’s Climate Data From Deletion

CREATIVITY

1. Kesha releases emails allegedly sent by Dr. Luke
2. The Moral Rights in a Banksy?
3. The Met Goes Public Domain With CC0, But It Shouldn’t Have To
4. How the copyright industry works methodically to erode your civil liberties and human rights
5. The Need Right Now for Subversive Photography: What does it mean for a photograph to challenge what we know about the world and reveal new aspects of it?
6. Maasai people of East Africa fighting against cultural appropriation by luxury fashion labels: Their name and image is estimated to be worth billions of dollars 
7. Beyoncé to Get Lawyers in “Formation”
8. Paul McCartney chants ‘Get Back’ again – The Future of Copyright Termination 
9. Is There Copyright Infringement in Whoville?
10. Prince’s music will be on Spotify and other services starting Sunday: When you’re facing a $100M tax bill, it’s time to make a deal.
11. University Rejection of Students’ Marijuana – Themed T-Shirt Violates First Amendment – Gerlich v. Leath (Eric Goldman)
12. Use of P’s photos to advertise D’s goods must be challenged via copyright, not Lanham Act, under Dastar (Rebecca Tushnet)
13. Back To Basics: Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen Presents Near-Term FTC Reforms
14. Not Everyone Is Geeking Out Over Saudi Arabia’s First Comic Con: The cosplay fest is headed to the religious kingdom, but certain restrictions apply — especially for women
15. How Ancient Legends Gave Birth to Modern Superheroes
16. Can AI Make Musicians More Creative?: Google And Sony Want To Change The Way Artists Think About Artificial Intelligence
17. 2016 Copyright Year in Review
18. Robots As Legal Metaphors (Ryan Calo)
19. What Intellectual Property Can Learn From Informational Privacy, And Vice Versa (Diana Liebenau)

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Fuss over American Super Bowl ads ignores reality of Internet TV
2. CRTC wireless code review generates regulatory risk: Desjardins analyst
3. Why the Wireless Industry Fears Bill Transparency and Bans on Unlocking Fees (Michael Geist)
4. Comcast, AT&T Are Paying Minority Groups To Support Killing Net Neutrality
5. Wyden, Other Senators Warn That Net Neutrality Repeal Will Make SOPA Backlash Look Like A Fireside Snuggle
6. Tom Wheeler: Trump, GOP Plan To ‘Modernize’ The FCC A ‘Fraud’
7. The Trump administration’s other war on the media
8. FCC Commissioner Thinks Ultra-Fast Broadband Just a ‘Novelty’
9. ISPs ask lawmakers to kill privacy rules, and they’re happily obliging: Wheeler-era FCC rules that protect Web browsing data could be overturned.
10. “Broadband death star bill” blown up by municipal Internet advocates: Virginia anti-municipal broadband bill replaced by minor record-keeping change.
11. Yahoo reveals more breachiness to users victimized by forged cookies: Some accounts may have been accessed with forged cookies as recently as 2016.
12. Verizon Finally Gets Around To Telling Yahoo That It Ain’t All That
13. A Little Something Called Competition Forces Verizon To Bring Back Unlimited Data
14. Verizon offers unlimited data and won’t throttle video (unlike T-Mobile): Verizon’s $80 plan has unlimited phone data and 10GB of 4G LTE tethering.
15. Charter wrongly charged customers $10 “Wi-Fi Activation” fee, gets sued: Charter admits billing mistake in former Bright House area but faces a lawsuit.
16. Sewer broadband fraudsters handed lengthy prison terms: Bogus $200 million fiber network racket leads to collective 44 years in the slammer.
17. Lawyer’s claim: Feds issued a subpoena regarding Fox News sexual harassment scandal
18. A century and a half of Northern telecom innovations: Tracing 150 years of Canadian technological contributions to communication, from Bell to BlackBerry
19. The global media landscape: in eight charts
20. What does The Queen Mary International Dispute Resolution 2016 Survey tell us about the future direction of TMT disputes?
21. 2016 International Dispute Resolution Survey: An insight into resolving Technology, Media and Telecoms Disputes

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Canada’s Federal Court awards damages against a foreign website for breach of privacy laws
2. Oh, Sure, Suddenly Now The House Intelligence Boss Is Concerned About Surveillance… Of Mike Flynn
3. Judge sides with Microsoft, allows “gag order” challenge to advance – Court: “First Amendment rights may outweigh the Government interest in secrecy.”
4. Court Says Microsoft Can Sue Government Over First Amendment-Violating Gag Orders
5. What could happen if you refuse to unlock your phone at the US border?: DHS says agents are in the right to ask for passwords, decryption help.
6. Twitter to judge: Let us tell everyone exactly how many secret orders we get: Government fights Twitter’s attempts at transparency with generic filing.
7. Canada will soon force companies to disclose hacking attempts, data breaches
8. Amnesty International uncovers phishing campaign against human rights activists: Attacker targeted groups in Qatar, Nepal using extensive fake social media profile.
9. Russia Considers Returning Snowden to U.S. to ‘Curry Favor’ With Trump: Official
10. Landmark Court Decision Means Canada Has Now Joined The ‘Right To Be Forgotten Globally’ Club
11. Man jailed 16 months, and counting, for refusing to decrypt hard drives: He’s not charged with a crime. Judge demands he help prosecutors build their case.
12. After Passing Worst Surveillance Law In A Democracy, UK Now Proposes Worst Anti-Whistleblowing Law
13. UK government’s huge citizen data grab is go – where are the legal safeguards? – Analysis: Whitehall’s digital strategy lands a day after peers debate Digital Economy Bill.
14. UK Police Spy On Journalists At Small Town Paper, Gather One Million Minutes Worth Of Call Data
15. UK Train Operators Plan To Charge Passengers Using Their Biometrics
16. UK gov’t hit by 188 serious cyberattacks in the past three months: NCSC claims that Russia and China have stepped up the game.
17. DHS Secretary Says Agency Is Planning On Demanding Foreigners’ Social Media Account Passwords
18. Ohio Arsonist Gets Busted By His Own Pacemaker
19. Now sites can fingerprint you online even when you use multiple browsers: Online tracking gets more accurate and harder to evade.
20. Does Facebook Have the Right to Challenge Search Warrants Seeking Facebook Users’ Data? New York’s Highest Court Hears Argument 
21. Republican senators concerned about Yahoo’s “candor” concerning data breaches: In new letter, two GOP senators say company has been “unable to provide answers.”
22. Digital star chamber: Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know (Frank Pasquale)
23. Get To Know Me: Protecting Privacy And Autonomy Under Big Data’s Penetrating Gaze (Sheri B. Pan)
24. Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy (Emily B. Laidlaw)

jon

GAMES

1. Oculus verdict: Judge awards ZeniMax $500 million: Facebook owned VR company did not misappropriate trade secrets as ZeniMax alleged, however
2. Oculus, execs liable for $500 million in ZeniMax VR trial: Court finds Rift maker broke NDA but didn’t steal trade secrets.
3. Lawsuit over NBA 2K facial scanning privacy concerns falls flat
4. Ohio State researcher’s study retracted from journal: Research from an Ohio State communication professor was retracted from a scientific journal after two outside researchers found discrepancies in variables from the original experiment when they replicated the study.
5. A Professor Claimed Video Games Make People Better Shooters — Then His Study Got Retracted: Brad Bushman has some explaining to do
6. 2012 Research Paper Linking Video Games And Violence Finally Retracted Over Massaged Data Accusation
7. Report: GameStop staff under fresh pressure to sell used games over new ones
8. ‘NBA 2K’ Video Game Maker Beats Lawsuit Over Biometric Face-Scanning: A judge rejects gamers’ privacy complaint because they haven’t alleged a concrete injury.
9. FBI reveals 173-page Gamergate file
10. EA’s earnings show revenues are up, losses are better than expected
11. Nintendo’s nine-month profits soar on Pokémon and Seattle Mariners sale: Pokémon Sun & Moon sold 14.7m units worldwide, full-year profit forecast almost doubled to ¥‎90 billion
12. Nintendo addresses “weak” Switch launch lineup: President Tatsumi Kimishima says company wants to avoid long gaps without new games, pledges continued support for 3DS
13. Two speed market drove over $30 billion in games deals in 2016: Tim Merel of Digi-Capital on how 2016 broke the industry M&A record by 77%
14. Deep dive in the data of Games on Kickstarter in 2016
15. Mad Catz threatened with stock market delisting
16. Microsoft’s games revenue continues to slip due to falling hardware sales
17. Microsoft fails to impress tech media by selling thousands of HoloLenses: $3,000 enterprise headsets experience lower sales than mass-market consumer devices.
18. Disney shuts down Club Penguin: Original kid-friendly virtual world going dark, to be replaced by mobile-exclusive Club Penguin Island in March
19. Devs, don’t post positive Steam reviews of your game under fake names
20. Valve to start blocking accounts that gamble Team Fortress 2 gear
21. eSports: The missed billion-dollar opportunity for publishers and platforms
22. Resident Evil 7’s Denuvo protections cracked in under a week: Quick turnaround by hackers could have profound business implications.
23. Hackers unlock NES Classic, upload new games via USB cable: It’s not as simple as drag-and-drop, but no screwdriver or hardware mods needed.
24. The Founder’s Dilemma: A terrifying new video game is a little too real.
25. Kojima says games and movies must ‘converge’ to survive
26. Working with influencers: “The internet can smell disingenuity a mile off”: Space Ape’s Simon Hade discusses the perks and pitfalls of working with YouTubers and streamers
27. In Berlin, refugees become friends—through board games: Building bridges with board games.
28. The Radical Environmentalism of the Sega Genesis
29. King on diversity: “No company will succeed on its own here.” – Diversity and culture manager Natalie Mellin says more firms need to “show role models together” in order to address gender imbalance
30. How closing borders kills understanding, and censors art
31. GDC responds to Trump’s travel ban, refunds affected attendees: Organisers of upcoming developer conference says they are “horrified” by President’s decision
32. ESA urges caution on US immigration policy: Trade group tells Trump administration that foreign workers are vital to domestic game industry
33. ‘It breaks my heart’: Engaredev responds to U.S. travel ban: “What makes me sad is that I hear in the game industry that there are all these diversity programs, but then, if you’re looking for diversity, for new perspectives, there are really a lot of new perspectives in those countries the US is blocking.”
34. “Immigration ban will harm us as a company” – Insomniac: Ratchet and Clank and Spider-Man maker joins chorus of game developers condemning executive order
35. Trump is bad for the US games industry: An isolationist, nationalist administration can’t help but harm an increasingly diverse and global industry
36. 1979 Revolution proceeds to benefit ACLU in wake of immigration ban
37. 2017 Trends in Mobile Gaming
38. PETA demands plastic Warhammerfigures stop wearing fur: In the grim darkness of the far future, it’s the animals that have it worst.
39. Namco founder and “Father of Pac-Man” has died: Masaya Nakamura was instrumental in kickstarting the video game revolution of the 1980s

DIGITAL

1. Intellectual Property Owner Awarded Control of Infringer’s Social Media Accounts
2. Perfect 10, Inc. v. Giganews, Inc.
3. Facebook Live Is the Right Wing’s New Fox News: How the rough-around-the-edges live-streaming tool became the perfect incubator for conservative news in the Trump age.
4. The Data That Turned the World Upside Down
5. Axel Springer CEO: Facebook should not fact check ‘fake news’ — it is not a news organization
6. Flush with anti-Trump donations, ACLU gets Y Combinator’s mentorship
7. China’s Response To Study Confirms It Uses ‘Strategic Distraction’ To Prevent Collective Action. Sound Familiar?
8. Copyright Trolls Overplay Their Hand In Finland, Bringing A Government Microscope To Their Practices
9. RIP, “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System: The anti-piracy accord between ISPs and entertainment industry meets its demise.
10. Ding Dong: Silly Six Strikes Copyright Infringement Scheme Is Dead
11. Internet Service Providers, Studios and Record Labels Call It Quits on Copyright Alert System
12. The US ‘Six Strikes’ Anti-Piracy Scheme is Dead: The “six-strikes” Copyright Alert System is no more. In a brief announcement, MPAA, RIAA, and several major US ISPs said that the effort to educate online pirates has stopped. It’s unclear why the parties ended their voluntary agreement, but the lack of progress reports in recent years indicates that it wasn’t as successful as they had hoped
13. Venezuelan officials arrest four Bitcoin miners on charges of stealing electricity: With the economy in shambles, Bitcoin miners have tried to side-step currency woes.
14. Monero, the Drug Dealer’s Cryptocurrency of Choice, Is on Fire
15. Sony missed writing on the wall for DVD sales, takes nearly $1B writedown: Or, in corporate-speak, loss was “mainly driven by an acceleration of market decline.”
16. Thanks to YouTube, Vevo Nears 100 Million Active Monthly Users
17. Lawyer for “inventor of e-mail” sends threat letter over social media posts: Shiva Ayyadurai’s attorney, who sued Techdirt, goes after another blogger.
18. Thousands of College Kids Are Powering a Clickbait Empire: How a 29-year-old built Odyssey, a vast network of college students happy to fuel multi-million dollar marketing campaigns for peanuts.
19. The internet of toys
20. Robot knows when to hold ‘em, wins huge in poker tournament: 120,000 hands and a $1.7 million margin of victory later, Carnegie Mellon’s AI wins out.
21. Click Here to Kill Everyone: With the Internet of Things, we’re building a world-size robot. How are we going to control it? (Bruce Schneier)
22. The merging of humans and machines is happening now: Her organisation invented the internet. It gave us the self-driving car. And now DARPA’s former boss sees us crossing a new technological boundary
23. Tech Leaders Are Just Now Getting Serious About the Threats of AI: Apple joins a leading AI ethics group, one of several tech-led initiatives preparing for a highly automated future.
24. The Gates Foundation Emerges As A Leader In The Fight For Full Open Access And Open Data
25. Apple will move its entire international iTunes business to Ireland: International HQ will move from one tax haven to another.
26. Apple sets revenue and iPhone sales records in Q1 of 2017
27. TV shows go into overdrive on Snapchat
28. Can One App Revolutionize TV Ratings For The Streaming And Binge-Watching Era?
29. Causality in machine learning
30. Canada’s Supreme Court Is Preserving Every Website Mentioned In Its Rulings
31. What We Buy When We Buy Now (Aaron Perzanowski & Chris Hoofnagle)

CREATIVITY

1. Fairness Confirmed Again: Federal Court of Appeal Upholds Copyright Board’s Fair Dealing Ruling (Michael Geist)
2. Supreme Court rejects appeal against B.C. Election Act: Registration rules for political ad sponsors don’t restrict individual political expression, court finds
3. Back To The Stampede: Court Upholds Forum Selection Clause Requiring Copyright Action To Return to Alberta
4. Actress in Viral Video Can’t Prevent Video From Being Made Into an Advertisement–Roberts v. Bliss (Eric Goldman)
5. Ninth Circuit Finds First Amendment Protects Against Right-of-Publicity Claim Involving Film “The Hurt Locker” 
6. Woman Claims Her Picture is Worth $2 Billion in Right of Publicity Suit
7. Court of Appeal endorses Data Protection Act as alternative to defamation claim
8. The Federal Court of Appeal Rules on Access Copyright’s K-12 Tariff
9. The New Joint DOJ/FTC Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property 
10. Judge Gorsuch On Copyright And Technology (James Grimmelmann)
11. Apple sued over singer’s right of publicity in iPhone ad singing: No copyright, but can an artist’s voice sustain a “right of publicity” case?
12. Mac Repair Company iGeniuses Sends Legal Threats To Unhappy Customers, Demanding $2500 Per Negative Review
13. Michael Jackson Is Worth More Than Ever, and the IRS Wants Its Cut: Jackson’s star lawyer made a mint for his heirs, so now the government has to be startin’ somethin’.
14. Germany Finally Dumps Law That Says It’s A Crime To Insult Foreign Leaders
15. Jose Cuervo Loses Bid To Block Trademark Registration For Il Corvo Wine
16. The Shattered Mirror, Part One: Fair Dealing Reform Isn’t the Answer for News in the Digital Age (Michael Geist)
17. How the arts helped kill off the NEA — by trying to play the conservative “economic value” game: Our strategy of ditching “Art for Art’s Sake” in favor of “ArtWorks” hasn’t saved the arts — and it never will
18. Trump Advisor Pens Almost Totally Clueless Piece About ‘Intellectual Property Theft’
19. How True Advertising Can Save Journalism From Drowning in a Sea of Content
20. Strategies for Discerning the Boundaries of Copyright and Patent Protections (Pamela Samuelson)
21. Freeing Buskers’ Free Speech Rights: Impact of Regulations on Buskers’ Right to Free Speech and Expression (John Jurich)

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Ajit Pai on net neutrality: “I favor an open Internet and I oppose Title II”: New FCC chairman won’t say whether he’ll enforce net neutrality rules.
2. FCC Chairman Pai takes Wheeler’s set-top box plan off the table: Cable industry was open to compromise, but no Republican plan has been offered.
3. FCC exempts small ISPs from broadband truth-in-billing rules: Rule requiring disclosure of hidden fees won’t benefit customers of small ISPs.
4. Pai FCC’s First Commission-Level Vote Targets Rural Broadband Access 
5. Sen. Franken asks AT&T to prove Time Warner merger is good for customers: AT&T won’t commit to public interest statement as it tries to avoid FCC review.
6. Eliminating Net Neutrality likely to raise the cost of using the Internet
7. New York AG Sues Charter For Slow Broadband Speeds, Says Company ‘Ripping Off’ Users With Substandard Service
8. Republican-led FCC drops court defense of inmate calling rate cap: FCC lawyers no longer authorized to defend intrastate calling caps.
9. Verizon Eyes Charter Megamerger, Because Who Likes Broadband Competition Anyway?
10. Comcast will charge extra fee for watching TV on Roku boxes: Xfinity beta app is now on Roku; for now, customers still need a Comcast TV box.
11. 13 Years Ago at the Last Houston Super Bowl – Janet Jackson’s Impact on FCC Indecency Rules 

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Suspecting arson, cops subpoena homeowner’s pacemaker logs, then charge him with multiple felonies
2. Trump’s Executive Order Eliminates Privacy Act Protections for Foreigners (Michael Geist)
3. New Trump Executive Order Says Federal Agencies Should Exclude Foreigners From Privacy Protections
4. President Trump’s Executive Order May Impact the Privacy Shield 
5. Already Under Attack In Top EU Court, Privacy Shield Framework For Transatlantic Data Flows Further Undermined By Trump
6. Trump Orders The Cyber To Be Fixed In The Next Sixty Days
7. Twitter Reveals Two National Security Letters After Gag Orders Lifted; Rightly Complains About Gag Orders
8. Court Says Location Of FBI’s Utility Pole-Piggybacking Surveillance Cameras Can Remain Secret
9. Bodycam footage leaks, resisting arrest charges dropped – Girl screams: “I just recorded everything.” Police officer responds: “Me too.”
10. Appeals court rules that stolen laptops class action against payer can proceed
11. Live Streaming: The Privacy Concerns of Behind-the-Scenes Access
12. Site that sold access to 3.1 billion passwords vanishes after reported raid: LeakedSource garnered criticism for actively cracking the passwords it sold.
13. Majority of Android VPNs can’t be trusted to make users more secure: Study of nearly 300 apps finds shocking omissions, including a failure to encrypt.
14. St. Louis Cardinals Hacking Scandal: A Real-World Example of the Importance of Password Management 
15. Amidst Increased Government Surveillance, Chinese Internet Users Finally Gain Important Online Privacy Protections
16. One More Time With Feeling: ‘Anonymized’ User Data Not Really Anonymous
17. FTC Report Reinforces the Rules for Cross-Device Tracking
18. “You took so much time to joke me”—two hours trolling a Windows support scammer: “Albert Morris” and team get taken for a ride while we tried to track their tradecraft.
19. Blue Lies Matter: BuzzFeed News reviewed 62 incidents of video footage contradicting an officer’s statement in a police report or testimony. From traffic stops to fatal force, these cases reveal how cops are incentivized to lie — and why they get away with it.
20. In not-too-distant future, brain hackers could steal your deepest secrets: Religious beliefs, political leanings, and medical conditions are up for grabs.

jon

GAMES

1. US court says PSN data doesn’t get Fourth Amendment protection: Sony could hand info to the police without a warrant.
2. Microsoft, Epic sued over Gears of War character: Former football player and pro wrestler claims his likeness, voice were stolen for Cole Train
3. Zuckerberg testifies against claims that Oculus stole IP from Zenimax
4. At trial, Zuckerberg is “highly confident” Oculus built its own technology: Facebook CEO says he’d “never even heard of ZeniMax before” trial.
5. Oculus accused of destroying evidence, Zuckerberg to testify in VR theft trial: Id Software’s parent co. says it created VR tech. Carmack says claims are “absurd.”
6. Oculus VR destroyed evidence regarding Rift’s creation, ZeniMax claims: “ZeniMax and id Software are the visionary developers of breakthrough VR technology”
7. Facebook Study Finds Introverts Feel More Comfortable with VR Social Interaction
8. Inside IMAX’s Big Bet to Rule the Future of VR
9. Esports Games Tiers
10. GDC State of the Industry: For the first time, devs favor Android over iOS
11. Where are the Xbox One’s exclusives?: Scalebound’s cancellation draws attention to this year’s anaemic Xbox line-up; is this Scorpio’s rain shadow, or a more worrying trend?
12. Nintendo Switch: One last roll of the dice
13. Nintendo sets a high price for Switch peripherals: Additional charging dock will be $90, and an extra Joy-Con controller and Grip will be $110
14. Nintendo should unswitch the Switch to avoid a Kinect-astrophe: New system’s bundled “home” kit already appears to be the worst of all worlds.
15. Nintendo stock value dips following Switch showcase
16. Reports: PS4 is selling twice as well as Xbox One, overall
17. Respawn cancels Titanfall mobile game: First title in Nexon partnership canned after its beta test, heaping more uncertainty on Respawn’s shooter franchise
18. How a robot got Super Mario 64 and Portal “running” on an SNES
19. First-ever computer sports game recreated at The Strong museum
20. GameStop CEO laments ‘disappointing’ holiday period as sales tumble
21. What To Expect – Video Game Cybersecurity In 2017

DIGITAL

1. Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier
2. Brexit leads to iOS App Store price jump: Apple raising prices by just under 25% to account for pound’s depreciation since vote to leave the EU
3. Labor Department sues Oracle for racial discrimination: Regulators say white male workers paid more than non-white counterparts.
4. Feds sue Qualcomm for anti-competitive patent licensing: Regulators say “no license, no chip” policy amounts to an illegal monopoly.
5. BuzzFeed’s Bombshell: Why the site published the explosive memos about Trump and Russia—and why no one beat them to it.
6. Was BuzzFeed wrong to publish the Trump dossier? This media ethicist says yes.: “They were serving themselves and their own clicks.” –Kelly McBride, vice president of Poynter
7. Here’s Why BuzzFeed Was Right to Publish Those Trump Documents
8. Exclusive interview with BuzzFeed editor: BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief talks to Brian Stelter about the decision to publish the unsubstantiated dossier on President-elect Donald Trump
9. Trump Is Making Journalism Great Again: In his own way, Trump has set us free.
10. Techdirt’s First Amendment Fight For Its Life
11. How To Use Facebook And Fake News To Get People To Murder Each Other: In South Sudan, a country where the vast majority of people lack internet access, fake news and hateful speech leap from Facebook to the real world — with possibly deadly consequences.
12. Yet Another Lawsuit Hopes A Court Will Hold Twitter Responsible For Terrorists’ Actions
13. Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier
14. Land Court Finds that Texting Can Bind Parties 
15. Online Price Advertising: Amazon to Pay $1.1 Million to Settle Canadian Competition Bureau Investigation 
16. New York Times report: ‘The Internet is brutal to mediocrity’
17. The Great Unbundling
18. Software Copyright Litigation After Oracle v. Google
19. No, you do not have to pay a ‘settlement fee’ if you get an illegal download notice
20. San Francisco sues local drone maker, drone maker then shuts down: Lily Robotics never shipped a single drone.
21. YouTube livestreams now have their own tip jar
22. The Inside Story of BitTorrent’s Bizarre Collapse: How a group of valley outsiders blew through the company’s cash and nearly left it for dead.
23. How Netflix Lost Big to Amazon in India: The streaming company botched its chance to own India’s huge new video market.
24. The next best thing to teleportation: Living in one country and working in another will soon be common, thanks to remote-control robots. Future Now spoke with economist Richard Baldwin about how this trend could change the world.
25. Student Disciplined for Posting Threatening Mashup Video to Instagram–AN v. Upper Perkiomen School District (Eric Goldman)
26. Drone maker Lily Robotics sued by San Francisco district attorney
27. Why Blockchain Will Trump Populism
28. The entire modern copyright was built on one fundamental assumption that the Internet has reversed
29. Treat robots as “electronic persons” but with kill switches, argue MEPs: Committee approves proposal that mulls “electronic personality” for robots.
30. Using Tinder in Your Hometown Is Like Visiting an Alternate Reality: Surfing the app on a trip back home can be a way of regressing, or imagining what life would be like if you never left.
31. Siri-ously 2.0: What Artificial Intelligence Reveals About the First Amendment (Toni M. Massaro, Helen Norton, Margot E. Kaminski)

CREATIVITY

1. Fake News, Fake Art?  Richard Prince Disavows Work Depicting Ivanka Trump
2. Ceci n’est pas une Prince*: Richard Prince Appropriates and Repurposes Himself 
3. How the Killers & a fortune cookie turned philanthropic
4. Star Trek fan-fiction copyright suit tests ‘fair use’ defence
5. Louis Vuitton’s appeal fails in parody case
6. LA Chargers Already Face Trademark Opposition To Their Name Over The Term ‘L.A.’
7. Artist creates “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” memes to stop people from whitewashing MLK
8. How Reality TV Builds Narrative Is Crucial to Understanding Trump
9. For Hollywood, The Best Way To Win Against Disney Is To Not Be Disney
10. New Study Essentially Suggests That Publishers Should Do CwF + RtB Instead Of Going Legal To Combat Piracy
11. What If China’s Money Stream Stops Flowing to Hollywood?
12. Austria: Tattoos and Copyright
13. Billions of Bilious Barbecued Blue Blistering Barnacles: Tintin Gets Color Makeover!
14. Lucasfilm: Carrie Fisher will not return to Star Wars in CGI form: Still leaves major questions about Leia’s role in Episode IX unanswered.
15. Beware! Academics are getting reeled in by scam journals: The number of predatory publishers is skyrocketing – and they’re eager to pounce on unsuspecting scholars.
16. Copyright Reform in Canada – the 2017 Section 92 Review (Howard Knopf)
17. Quick Links, Part 10: Marketing, Uber, Airbnb, Taxes & More (Eric Goldman)
18. 2016 Quick Links, Part 11: Social Media, Harassment, E-Discovery & More (Eric Goldman)
19. Free speech debates are more than ‘radicals’ vs ‘liberals’ (Eric Heinze)

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Not Exactly a Netflix Tax: Where Canada Stands on a Digital Sales Tax (Michael Geist)
2. Careful: a digital tax isn’t the same as a Netflix tax
3. Killing net neutrality at FCC is “not a slam dunk,” departing chair says: While Republicans could end net neutrality, Wheeler explains why they shouldn’t.
4. Outgoing FCC Boss Warns New FCC About The Perils Of Killing Net Neutrality
5. FCC Report Clearly Says AT&T & Verizon Are Violating Net Neutrality — And Nobody Is Going To Do A Damn Thing About It
6. Report: Verizon Considering Comcast Merger In Supernova Of Dysfunction
7. Trump team reportedly wants to strip FCC of consumer protection powers
8. Trump’s Plan Is To Gut All FCC Consumer Protection Powers
9. Don’t Touch That Dial: Why attempts to improve AM and FM radio technologies tend to land with a thud—a thud no harder felt than with the FMX standard, circa 1989. 

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Assange weasels out of pledge to surrender if Manning received clemency: WikiLeaks founder now says it’s not good enough Manning will be released in May.
2. Chinese Officials With Government Access To Every Kind Of Personal Data Are Selling It Online
3. Court rules against man who was forced to fingerprint-unlock his phone: Unlocking a phone like this “is no more testimonial than furnishing a blood sample.”
4. Mississippi AG Jim Hood sues Google—again
5. Syrian Migrant Says He’s Tired Of Being The Subject Of ‘Fake News,’ Sues Facebook For Posts Linking Him To Terrorism
6. It’s shockingly easy to hijack a Samsung SmartCam camera: Web management interface susceptible to command-execution bug.
7. Empirical Data on the Privacy Paradox
8. Cell Phone Hacking Company Hacked; 900 GB Of Logins, Log Files, And Forensic Evidence Taken
9. Did The FISA Court Finally Reject The FBI’s Advances?
10. Top UK Cop Says Hackers Should Be Punished Not With Prison, But With Jammed WiFi Connections
11. VR as the Most Powerful Surveillance Technology or Last Bastion of Privacy? It’s up to Us.
12. Law Enforcement Has Been Using OnStar, SiriusXM, To Eavesdrop, Track Car Locations For More Than 15 Years
13. NSA to share data with other agencies without “minimizing” American information: Rules opposed by civil liberties and privacy advocates.
14. It’s Official: Sixteen Government Agencies Now Have Access To Unminimized Domestic NSA Collections
15. After Lawsuits And Denial, Pacemaker Vendor Finally Admits Its Product Is Hackable
16. Cloudflare Finally Able To Reveal FBI Gag Order That Congress Told Cloudflare Couldn’t Possibly Exist
17. Our Apathy Toward Privacy Will Destroy Us. Designers Can Help: The loss of security and privacy online may seem inevitable, but designers can help the public help themselves.
18. Privacy’s Trust Gap (Neil Richards & Woodrow Hartzog)

jon

GAMES

1. Planet Coaster dev suing Atari over $2.2M in unpaid royalties
2. Frontier suing Atari over RollerCoaster Tycoon royalties: Cambridge-based developer claims it is owed $2.2m, has attempted to resolve situation without legal action
3. Iranian government blocks access to Clash of Clans: An official committee backed restrictions based on fear that Supercell’s game could incite tribal conflict
4. Platinum’s Ninja Turtles game pulled from digital stores after eight months
5. Former Project IGI devs buy IP back from Square Enix: But developer Artplant not announcing new game just yet, re-releases and remasters are off the cards
6. Porsche’s exclusive deal with Electronic Arts is no more: After 17 years, the exclusive deal ends, freeing Porsches to appear in new games.
7. Minecraft expansion successfully tricks students into learning: Tiny preliminary study suggests that it worked reasonably well.
8. World of Warcraft featured in exhibit on world-changing tech
9. Experimental VR Alzheimer’s Therapy App Made Just Hours After Plea by Child of Afflicted Father
10. Managing Pain & Anxiety in Hospitals with AppliedVR
11. Virtual Therapy for Stroke Neurorehabilitation & Skill Relearning
12. Opinion: Technology Killed 1v1 Esports
13. Super Mario Run’s missed opportunity
14. Nintendo switches off Devil’s Third servers for good
15. Hearthstone devs reluctant to make community videos for fear of harassment
16. Nvidia makes it easier for gamers to stream live to Facebook
17. Nvidia brings GeForce Now game streaming to any PC or Mac
18. NHL Involvement, Conversation Around eSports Currently ‘A Sperm Cell’
19. The Best of the Rest: Ars Staffers’ favorite games of 2016 – They’re not the “Game of the Year,” but these games were still important to us.
20. Historians discuss Civilization VI
21. Someone Is Destroying Online Go, And Nobody Knows Who It Is

DIGITAL

1. ‘Copyright Trolls’ Hit With Class Action Lawsuit For Theft by Deception
2. Browsewraps, fair dealing and Blacklock’s Reporter v Canada: a critical commentary
3. Failure to Introduce Source Code of Original Work Fatal to Claim Against Alleged Derivative Work
4. Apple pulls New York Times apps from Chinese App Store by China’s request: Apps have been missing from the store since December 23.
5. Honest Shanghai app gives citizens public credit score
6. China has made obedience to the State a game: China has created a social tool which gives people a score for how good a citizen they are
7. Web of tax breaks and subsidies keeps iPhone production in China: Foxconn’s clout as Apple’s manufacturing partner nets billions in incentives.
8. Apple’s FaceTime blamed for girl’s highway crash death in new lawsuit: Family claims Apple should have deployed patented tech to “lock-out” motorists.
9. Victims Of Car Crash Sue Apple For Not Preventing Distracted Driver From Hitting Their Vehicle
10. Families of Orlando nightclub shooting victims sue Facebook, Google and Twitter
11. Follow Buddies and Block Buddies: A Simple Proposal to Improve Civility, Control, and Privacy on Twitter (Danielle Citron & Benjamin Wittes)
12. Google Apparently No Longer Humoring Court Orders To Delist Defamatory Content
13. The Most Important Law in Tech Has a Problem: How “safe harbor” turned into a protector of privilege.
14. Facebook scrubs — then restores — post that called Trump supporters ‘fascists’
15. Now Italy Wants To Make ‘Fake News’ Illegal
16. How Amazon, Google, and Facebook Will Bring Down Telcos
17. Op-ed: Five unexpected lessons from the Ashley Madison breach – This is the first FTC complaint involving lying bots – there will be more.
18. Pirates: You Can Click But You (Can’t) Can Hide
19. LG threatens to put Wi-Fi in every appliance it introduces in 2017: Its new fridge includes Amazon’s Alexa and a bunch of cameras.
20. Snapchat using machine learning to introduce greater targeting to its ad stack
21. Ridiculous Congressional Proposal Would Fine Reps Who Live Stream From The Floor
22. From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck (Spoilers)
23. 2016 Was The Year Torrent Giants Fell
24. Is an NSA contractor the next Snowden? In 2017, we hope to find out: These 5 cases touch on the near-future of drones, privacy and IP law.
25. Glasses From eSight Help Legally Blind Indianapolis Colts Fan See First Game
26. The Chatbot Will See You Now
27. The Bot Politic: Silicon Valley’s usual solution to designing an inoffensive, eager-to-please technology has been to make it a woman. But why use gender at all?
28. The most dramatic patent and copyright cases of 2016: Google v. Oracle; Prenda lawyers arrested; and much more.
29. Our Unfortunate Annual Tradition: A Look At What Should Have Entered The Public Domain, But Didn’t
30. Fighting for Fair Use and Safer Harbors: 2016 in Review (EFF)

CREATIVITY

1. ‘Star Trek’ Fan Film Not Fair Use, Will Be Tried by Jury
2. Aussie Productivity Commission Doubles Down On Fair Use And Serious Copyright & Patent Reform
3. Surrender Dorothy: Court Upholds Damages, Injunction for Movie Content Infringement
4. Welcome, Mr. Walt Disney, to the Canadian Public Domain (Howard Knopf)
5. Milo Yiannopoulos’s Cynical Book Deal
6. Milo Yiannopoulos Inks Book Deal With Simon & Schuster: The “alt-right” icon was banned from Twitter after launching a widespread attack on actress Leslie Jones.
7. Simon & Schuster Threatened with Boycott for $250K Book Deal with Alt-Right Homocon Troll Milo Yiannopoulos
8. Our Murrow Moment: The time for hand-wringing and hysteria is over. The Trump presidency promises a civic stress test. In a time of principled fights, citizens and journalists need to respond with fearlessness rooted in fairness.
9. Librarians must resist trumpism
10. Actors rush to protect their image from ‘digital resurrection’ after they have died following eerie Star Wars: Rogue One reanimation of Carrie Fisher
11. Fox News Opinions Get Wide Berth Under Defamation Law
12. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: ‘The Bachelor’ Is Killing Romance in America
13. Creative solutions to cultural appropriation – fashion industry
14. The most dramatic patent and copyright cases of 2016: Google v. Oracle; Prenda lawyers arrested; and much more.
15. Tesla Gave Up Its Patents, But People Are Freaked Out That Faraday Future Put Its Own Into A Separate Company
16. Ten Worst Section 230 Rulings Of 2016 (Plus The Five Best)
17. 2016 Quick Links, Part 3: Trademarks And Domain Names (Eric Goldman)
18. 2016 Quick Links, Part 4: Counterfeits And Olympics (Eric Goldman)
19. 2016 Quick Links, Part 5: Patents, Other IP, Employment, CFAA (Eric Goldman)
20. Functionality Screens (Christopher Buccafusco & Mark Lemley)

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Terence Corcoran: The CRTC needs to stop playing this game and let networks decide what ads run during the Super Bowl
2. Canada Classifies Broadband as a Basic Telecommunications Service
3. Tucker Carlson delivers sexism for Fox News
4. Megyn Kelly Is Leaving Fox News for NBC
5. Canada among the ‘most expensive mobile data countries,’ report says: People are worried about ‘crazy, huge overage fees,’ OpenMedia spokeswoman says
6. FCC Approves Up to 49% Foreign Ownership of Univision – What Guidance is Provided to Potential Foreign Investors in US Broadcast Stations? 
7. FCC Settles Largest Lifeline Enforcement Case for $30 million and Permanent Ban from the Program 
8. FCC Denies Petition for Declaratory Ruling on Fax Advertisements 
9. Dutch Regulators Demand T-Mobile Stop Zero Rating, Remind Users That Free Data Isn’t Really Free
10. Cord-Cutting Forces Cable Networks to Make Hard Choices
11. CASL — Year in Review

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. A French court case against Google could threaten global speech rights
2. Obama administration announces measures to punish Russia for 2016 election interference
3. White House Kicks Russian Diplomats Out Of The Country, Releases Preliminary Report On Russian Hacking With More To Come
4. Obama tosses 35 Russians out of US, sanctions others for election meddling: Intelligence dump from DHS and FBI bolsters claims of Russian election interference.
5. Singapore Will Add Iris Scans As Identifier For Citizens And Permanent Residents Starting January 1
6. UK Councils Used Massive Surveillance Powers To Spy On… Excessively Barking Dogs & Illegal Pigeon Feeding
7. Surveillance in Latin America: 2016 in Review (EFF)
8. Facebook buys data on users’ offline habits for better ads: And opting out is a lot more complicated than it should be.
9. Man Has To Beg LG To Uncripple His ‘Smart’ TV After Ransomware Attack
10. Malware Purveyor Serving Up Ransomware Via Bogus ICANN Blacklist Removal Emails
11. Online and Mobile Tracking Company Settles FTC Charges It Deceptively Tracked Consumers
12. Watch out hackers: Deploying ransomware is now a crime in California: Previously, prosecutors had to rely on the state’s extortion statute.
13. Confirmed Horrible Person James Woods Continues Being Horrible In ‘Winning’ Awful Lawsuit To Unmask Deceased Online Critic
14. EU Binding Corporate Rules For Transferring Data: A Comparison of US Law, EU Law, and Soon-To-Be EU Law
15. The Real Name Fallacy
16. When Do Data Breaches Cause Harm? (Daniel Solove)

jon

GAMES

1. Pokémon ROM hack stopped by Nintendo four days before launch: In highly unusual move, Nintendo targets a ROM hack—essentially, a mod.
2. Super Mario Run slower to top charts than Pokémon Go
3. Nintendo shares fall despite Super Mario Run’s instant success
4. Overwatch comic locked in Russia due to “gay propaganda”: Latest comic not readable in Russia as Tracer character established as homosexual
5. Survey: Men play games to compete, women play to complete
6. Brianna Wu running for US Congress in 2018: Games developer and victim of hate campaign wants a place on technology subcommittee, plans to combat cyber-bullying and revenge porn
7. How Christine Love makes sex in games believable, engaging, and funny: Ladykiller in a Bind avoids making any character “the avatar of queerness.”
8. Ex-Crytek dev crowdfunding legal fees to sue for unpaid salaries: Former FX artists claims he has not been paid since September, pay troubles began in May
9. No tears for Crytek: It’s one thing for a company to go under, but another to take its unwilling employees with it
10. Crytek to shutter five studios during restructure
11. Street Fighter V ragequitters to be publicly shamed with profile icon: Capcom hopes peer pressure will stop epidemic of intentional disconnects.
12. Like Flies: Doom The Latest Game To Remove Denuvo Via Patch
13. Denuvo says devs don’t get refunds if its anti-piracy tech is defeated
14. Netmarble buys Kabam’s Vancouver studio: Developer behind Marvel Contest of Champions joins Korean mobile company ahead of new Transformers game launch
15. Wicked leaks: what legal weaponry is available to fight game launch hacks?: Stevens & Bolton’s Grace McNulty-Brown advises devs on how to protect their project’s secrets ahead of release – and what to do if leaks do occur
16. The Luck and Loss Behind Loot Boxes
17. Riot and MLB Advanced Media finalize League of Legends deal: Baseball web business to pay at least $50 million annually through 2023 for the commercialization and monetization rights to LoL eSports
18. NFL Teams To Hold Madden Tournaments Streamed On Twitch In 2017
19. Esports Predictions: Great Growth in 2016, Storm Clouds for 2017
20. Fnatic: “We opened an eSports store to prove it was possible”: The professional gaming team opened a retail outlet in London last month – and it could be a sign of things to come
21. Bigben Interactive acquires rights to Test Drive brand from Atari
22. Where do consoles go from here?: 2016 marks the beginning of a new era of console iteration – what does it mean for the industry?
23. Can we go back in time and wipe Assassin’s Creed film from our DNA?: Michael Fassbender is the only light in this slow, nonsensical waste of a franchise.
24. How 1979 Revolution: Black Friday Let Me Relive My Father’s History
25. Twitch wants its users to start streaming their ‘everyday lives’
26. 30 Years of Ubisoft: “The Guillemots are critical to our success”
27. Games have a place in higher education, but where they are now isn’t working.
28. Gamasutra’s Best of 2016: Top 10 Games of the Year
29. 2016: The year in games – The big events that shaped an extraordinary 12 months
30. 2016 games industry brings in $94 billion – Superdata: Research firm says mobile dominated the year, bringing in $41 billion compared to retail’s $26 billion and free-to-play online’s $19 billion
31. GamesIndustry.biz presents… 2016: The Year In Numbers: Check out some of the key facts and figures from the past twelve months with our handy infographic

DIGITAL

1. Google Is Battling Global Censorship In Canada’s Supreme Court
2. Families Of Orlando Shooting Victims Sue Twitter, Facebook, And Google For ‘Supporting Terrorism’
3. Kurt Eichenwald Sues Twitter Troll Over Alleged ‘Epileptic’ Image Assault
4. Google Finally Wins One Of Those Nutty Defamation Lawsuits Down Under
5. Manhattan Attorney Sues Google Over Three-Word ‘Libelous’ Review That Isn’t A Review Or Libelous
6. Google, Apple, Uber, IBM Say They Would Not Help Build A Muslim Registry: Meanwhile, Oracle declined to comment.
7. How to bump Holocaust deniers off Google’s top spot? Pay Google: Google ‘is unhappy’ with Holocaust denial beating the truth in its search results – but it probably makes more money that way
8. Washington Post automatically inserts Trump fact-checks into Twitter: Chrome plug-in comes 6 months after Trump revoked Post’s campaign press credentials.
9. Backpage Executives Defeat Pimping Charges Per Section 230–People v. Ferrer
10. Jury Rules for Arista in Cisco Copyright Case: Networking equipment makers had sparred over technology for hardware commands
11. Command Line Interface Copyright Case: Not Fair Use… But Not Infringing Thanks To Scenes A Faire
12. Prenda Law “copyright trolls” Steele and Hansmeier arrested: Lawyers who turned porn lawsuits into big business now face criminal charges.
13. Take a minute and read Yahoo’s 238 word CONFESSION about the Cyber theft of 1+ billion user accounts! 
14. Verizon Wants A Yahoo Price Cut After Company Reveals Another, Massive Hack Attack
15. Facebook charged with misleading EU over $22 billion WhatsApp takeover: Social networking giant “intentionally, or negligently, gave incorrect info.”
16. Facebook Pins a Scarlet Letter to Fake News: New tools and policies take on the News Feed’s worst offenders. But our truth problems are bigger than Facebook.
17. Facebook Announces Its Pilot Plans To ‘Deal’ With Fake News — Not With Censorship, But With More Info
18. Facebook will outsource fact-checking to fight fake news: Seven US fact-checking groups become Facebook News Feed’s new de-facto gatekeepers.
19. Conservative Media Freak Out Over Facebook’s Plan To Address The Fake News Problem
20. It’s time to get rid of the Facebook “news feed,” because it’s not news: Fake news didn’t throw the election. It was a symptom, not a cause.
21. Facebook is a monopoly, so why shouldn’t it be nationalised?
22. I was a victim of a Russian smear campaign. I understand the power of fake news.
23. The real history of fake news
24. Fake news and online harassment are more than social media byproducts — they’re powerful profit drivers
25. German law would fine social media sites “publishing” fake news: Social media sites must kill hoaxes within 24 hours, offer prominent corrections.
26. Now Germany Wants To Criminalize Fake News
27. Ridiculous German Court Ruling Means Linking Online Is Now A Liability
28. Dental Firm Tries To Dodge Section 230 With Trademark Claims; Runs Headfirst Into Anti-SLAPP Law
29. Uber’s Self Driving Cars Are Running Red Lights, Uber’s Blaming “Human Error”
30. Uber is losing money hand-over-fist: The ride-sharing company is disrupting the notion of profit.
31. Are eBay sellers the ultimate customer, or the ultimate consumable? #brickscam
32. Internet companies forced to block The Pirate Bay, bittorrent websites in Australia, Federal Court rules
33. First Aussie Pirate Bay Block Gets Defeated in Seconds
34. You can no longer be sued for leaving negative reviews online
35. President Obama Signs Law Making Ticket Buying Bots Illegal
36. Online Influencers Called Out in Second Letter to FTC
37. DMCA Process Abused To Nuke Post About Researcher Who Faked Data On Federally-Funded Study
38. Bitcoin Is Being Monitored By An Increasingly Wary U.S. Government
39. Supreme Court Will Hear A Case That Could Finally Shut Down East Texas As The Patent Troll Mecca
40. How The DMCA And The CFAA Are Preventing People From Saving Their Soon-To-Be-Broken Pebble Watches
41. How Imposter Buster, a Twitter Bot, Is Besting Anti-Semites: Some of these racists have been suspended by Twitter. Others have abandoned their trolling in frustration. And more are being added to the bot’s hit list by the day.
42. French drones to deliver the mail once per week: Trial limits drones to a nine-mile route.
43. Instagram reaches 600 million monthly active users; numbers doubled in two years
44. Apple given favorable treatment on tax? No way, insists Ireland: European Commission accused of “selectively” targeting Apple—according to Apple.
45. Someone published the wrong Mummy trailer and now it’s a meme
46. The holographic anime “robot” that will keep house for lonely salarymen: Gatebox connects home devices to an interactive anime “waifu” for “a new, shared lifestyle”.
47. CEIPI/EAO Conference–“Copyright Enforcement in the Online World”
48. How Do App Stores Challenge the Global Internet Governance Ecosystem?
49. Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy: Today, the White House released a new report on the ways that artificial intelligence will transform our economy over the coming years and decades.
50. How to Fix the Internet: Anonymity has poisoned online life. (Walter Isaacson)
51. Appeals Court Deals Rebuke To Controversial Prosecutor Who Targeted Aaron Swartz: U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz’s office “overstepped its bounds” in pursuing federal charges, the ruling said.

CREATIVITY

1. Locked & Loaded: The Gun Industry’s Lucrative Relationship With Hollywood – The NRA and the entertainment industry interact publicly as mortal enemies. But as the number of weapons shown in movies and TV steadily increases — and stars like Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie make fortunes wielding guns onscreen — a co-dependence that keeps both churning is revealed: “making the liberal bias a lot of money”
2. TV Networks, Studios Shifting Program Strategies in the Trump Age: “Are We Telling the Right Stories?”
3. Sirius XM wins New York appeal over older songs
4. New York stops the litigious sprawl of pre-1972 sound copyrights: Sirius XM comes back after The Turtles won early copyright victories.
5. The Battle Over Public Performance Rights Of Old Music Heats Up: NY Rejects, Supreme Court Petitioned
6. Flo & Eddie, Inc. v. Sirius XM Radio, Inc. (Dec. 20, 2016, 2nd Circuit C.A.)
7. Nestle loses EU Kit Kat trade mark tussle with Cadbury
8. Crunch time for Kit Kat’s 3D shape as EU judges show teeth in trademark row: Foretaste of a future food fight between rival four-finger products?
9. Branding Names: from Air Jordan to Linsanity and Trump Toilets
10. Review of the Copyright Act in 2017
11. Productivity Commission: Tales of the Widespread Demise of Canadian Publishers are Just That (Ariel Katz)
12. Australian report shows fair use vital in copyright reform
13. Fair Use… The Final Frontier?
14. U.S. Bill Would Introduce a Copyright Claims Board
15. Our copyright laws are holding us back, and there’s a way out
16. Federal Statute Barring Non-disparagement Clauses Is Enacted
17. No Deal: German Universities Prepare For Cut-Off From Elsevier Journals
18. Seeking Open Access Deal, 60 German Academic Institutions Ditch All Subscriptions With Elsevier
19. Police Department’s Social Media Policy Is Unconstitutional–Liverman v. Petersburg (Eric Goldman)
20. Blacklock’s Must Pay $65,000 for Litigation that “should never have been commenced let alone carried to trial” (Howard Knopf)

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. CRTC rules high-speed Internet a ‘basic telecom service’
2. CRTC declares broadband internet a basic service: Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission says it can’t make full access to ultra-high speed services a reality on its own, and will require business and government help.
3. Telecom Regulatory Policy CRTC 2016-496: Modern telecommunications services – The path forward for Canada’s digital economy
4. CRTC’s ‘cornerstone’ ruling on basic telecom service expected to have repercussions for telcos
5. Internet bills reduced for thousands of Canadians after CRTC decision
6. A ‘Netflix Tax’ for the New Year? Maybe so
7. Ontario Government Tells Ottawa It Is Open to New Internet Tax to Fund Cancon (Michael Geist)
8. License Renewal Shows FCC Does Not Regulate Content – Implications for Calls to Regulate Fake News?
9. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to Step Down
10. Tom Wheeler to leave FCC on January 20 when Trump becomes president: Wheeler says being FCC chair was “greatest honor” of his professional life.
11. FCC Boss Tom Wheeler Resigns, Signaling The Beginning Of The End For Net Neutrality
12. Remaining FCC Commissioners Promise To Gut Net Neutrality ‘As Soon As Possible’
13. FCC Republicans vow to gut net neutrality rules “as soon as possible”: Pai and O’Rielly also promise not to enforce disclosure rules on small ISPs.
14. AT&T, Verizon Laugh At The FCC’s Last-Minute Attempt To Crack Down On Zero Rating
15. AT&T and Verizon try to fend off net neutrality case before Trump takes over: Net neutrality investigation likely on last legs because of Trump’s victory.
16. Comcast Admits Net Neutrality Rules Had No Real Impact On The Company
17. Happy New Year From Comcast: Usage Caps, Rate Hikes, And More Sneaky Fees In 2017
18. Sky agrees to £11.7 billion Fox takeover—handing full control to Murdoch: 21st Century Fox revives push for Sky after phone hacking saga killed last bid in 2011.
19. IOC, USOC And NBC Universal Announce Olympic Channel Partnership In The United States: New Linear Olympic Channel in the U.S. Devoted to Olympic Sports, Athletes and Stories to Launch in Second Half of 2017 – Partnership Includes Significant Commitment of Olympic Sports Programming Hours on NBC & NBCSN

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. EU’s highest court delivers blow to UK snooper’s charter: Indiscriminate collection of emails is illegal, court rules in response to challenge originally brought by David Davis
2. Investigatory Powers law setback: Blanket data slurp is illegal—top EU court: UK gov’t to appeal against judgment; says it’s a blow for everyday policing, other agencies.
3. Court Says Abandoned Phone Locked With A Passcode Still Has Expectation Of Privacy
4. U.S. Officials: Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack
5. Lawyer’s Twitter “parody” and #Pizzagate: ethics violation? 
6. Congrats, hackers: you’re now a munition (sort of): Wassenaar rules require export licenses for anything that could be considered “intrusion software”—but not in US, yet.
7. European Information Security Advisory Says Mandating Encryption Backdoors Will Just Make Everything Worse
8. James Clapper’s Office To Finally Reveal NSA’s ‘Incidental Collection’ Numbers
9. U.S. to disclose estimate of number of Americans under surveillance
10. Canadian telecoms push back on proposed police powers: Rogers, TekSavvy and others say the government hasn’t justified why it needs expanded digital powers
11. What can you do with a billion Yahoo passwords? Lots of bad things: Now, Yahoo user data could be behind scores of spear-phishes or other breaches.
12. Twitter Cuts Off Fusion Spy Centers’ Access to Social Media Surveillance Tool (ACLU)
13. Snowden’s ‘Proper Channel’ For Whistleblowing Being Booted From The NSA For Retaliating Against A Whistleblower
14. Surveillance Oversight Board Was Fun While It Lasted, But That’s Pretty Much Over For Now
15. How to rethink what’s ‘top secret’ for the Internet age
16. “Life Is Short. Settle with the FTC” – The Cost of Ashley Madison’s 2015 Data Breach 
17. Op-ed: Why I’m not giving up on PGP – Key discovery is an issue, but Signal can’t replace PGP.
18. UK schoolkid data shared to “create hostility” against illegal migrants: Up to 1,500 names a month pass between department for education and home office.
19. EFF Ad in Wired: Your threat model just changed
20. Risk And Anxiety: A Theory Of Data Breach Harms (Daniel J. Solove & Danielle Keats Citron)
21. Future of Privacy Forum’s “Must Read” Privacy Papers for Policymakers

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