Posts

GAMES

1. Lilith Games sues uCool for copyright infringement in federal court over ‘Heroes Charge’

+ Report: hidden code in uCool’s ‘Heroes Charge’ shows Lilith Games copyright

2. Sony’s US Bloodborne trademark expired on launch day

3. Indie Developer Retaliates To Negative Video With YouTube Takedown

4. New Chicago summit aims to raise awareness about video game law

5. Haunted House of Trademark Horrors: Meet the man who has been fighting an Atari trademark challenge for over three years.

+ TxK dev on Atari legal threats: “Attack me? They should have hired me”: Jeff Minter says his game is legally distinct from its Tempest inspiration.

6. PewDiePie, Anita Sarkeesian make Time’s ’30 Most Influential People on the Internet’ list

7. “That life is over”: Zoe Quinn looks beyond GamerGate

8. New ‘Offworld’ Gaming Site Seeks To Redefine Gamer Stereotypes

9.How League Of Legends Enables Toxicity

10. Report: YouTube Live will launch in 2015 with focus on game streaming

11. Square Enix shutting down ‘Final Fantasy XI’ for PS2 and Xbox 360 in 2016

12. Annual Rovio EBIT down 73% as merchandising falters

13. Iwata claims Nintendo’s deal with DeNA was not born out of shareholder pressure

14. This Is The Demo That Magic Leap Was Going To Show At Ted Before It Backed Out

+ 48 Crazy Ideas Coming From The $2 Billion Stealth Startup Magic Leap: Want A Peek At What Magic Leap Is Working On? We Pulled The Best Shots From Their Latest Patent Application.

15. Valve: “If there’s something useful, we’ll give it away”

16. Touchtone Holds A Mirror To Our Post-Snowden Surveillance State

17. Battlefield Hardline Review: Cop Out

18. Why Everyone Should Want Politics in Their Video Games

19. How Disney’s games are getting nearly 1M downloads a day and 70M unique users a month

20. World War II Snipers – Videogames vs History

21. The Changing Looks Of Final Fantasy’s Cid: Fashion Experts Weigh In

DIGITAL

22. This infographic shows the scope of internet censorship around the globe

23. The new authoritarianism (Sergi Guriev & Daniel Treisman)

24. Russia Will Deploy “Digital Fingerprinting” to Enforce Copyright Online

25. Tim Berners-Lee: We must take to the streets to protect the open web

26. Canadian Bar Association condemns Harper’s anti-terror bill: The group representing law professionals argues the bill’s “vague and overly broad language” could chill expressions of dissent.

+ How dangerous is C-51? You might be surprised (Michael Geist)

+ A Conversation About Bill C-51: How the Anti-Terrorism Bill Undermines Canadian Privacy (Michael Geist)

27. Digital Tailspin: Ten Rules for the Internet After Snowden, Michael Seemann

28. How social media makes us feel less upset about surveillance

29. Cisco Shipping Equipment to Fake Addresses to Foil NSA Interception

30. Pearson admits to monitoring students’ social media use during its online tests

31. FTC report reveals how Google manipulated its search results

32. Whether You’re Red or Blue, You Should Love the FCC’s Internet Plan (Susan Crawford)

33. Indian Law Used to Arrest People for Innocuous Facebook Posts Ruled Unconstitutional

34. AT&T is using the Title II rules it hates to get millions in refunds: FCC grants AT&T complaint on overcharges because of common carrier rules.

35. Ellen Pao “drove the returns” at VC firm while the men were promoted, lawyers say 

36. Twitter rolls out new filter for “threats, abusive language”

37. How Bloggers Made The Fashion Industry Pay More Attention To Minorities: The medium has forced the industry to recognize — and cater to — groups of women that it has completely ignored in the past.

38. Technology and Persuasion: Persuasive technologies surround us, and they’re growing smarter. How do these technologies work? And why?

39. How Life360 won its patent war

40. Rightscorp Discovering That Harassing Broadband Users Isn’t The Cash Cow It Thought It Would Be

41. Voltage Pictures Has To Pay $22k To Canadian ISP If It Wants Names For Its Shakedown Scheme

42. The Church Of Scientology is bad at Twitter

43. Beyond Freedom Of Information Requests: Freedom Of Code Requests

44. Internet TV’s Big Chance To Oust Cable Is Almost Here

45. For a brighter robotics future, it’s time to offload their brains: The power of cloud software could make robots smarter and less expensive.

46. Where next for robot journalists in the newsroom?: With Associated Press announcing that algorithmic programs will soon be used on the sports desk, should journalists be worried they’ll soon be replaced?

47. Yep, That Anti-Robot Protest At SXSW Was A Marketing Stunt [UPDATED]

48. Co-founder feuds at L.A. tech start-ups show how handshake deals can blow up

49. MRIs show our brains shutting down when we see security prompts

50. Humans: The Next Platform

51. Yik Yak And Online Anonymity Are Good For College Students

52. Balthus’ Soft-Core Polaroids Splash Down in Paris: An exhibit that is a violation of a young girl’s and a dead artist’s privacy. Or not.

53. Q&A: Cindy Cohn, EFF’s new executive director

54. Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe 

CREATIVITY

55. Bell head meddled in news coverage

+ Bell’s Crull Banned CRTC Chair Blais From CTV News Coverage Following TalkTV Decision

+ Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2015-96, Let’s Talk TV: A World of Choice – A roadmap to maximize choice for TV viewers and to foster a healthy, dynamic TV market

+ What on earth is happening at Bell?: Top 10 list of Bell legal/regulatory/privacy issues over just the past two years (Michael Geist)

+ Why the Vertically Integrated TV Giants Are the CRTC’s Hidden Target in Pick-and-Pay Decision

(Michael Geist)

56. The new Gamergate: Angry white men are trying to shut down diverse comics

57. Plagiarize This: A reasonable Solution to Musical Copyright After “Blurred Lines”

58. Remixing Culture And Why The Art Of The Mash-Up Matters

59. Elon Musk put SpaceX’s photos in the public domain: So why does Flickr say they’re licensed?

+ Elon Musk Says SpaceX Photos Are Now Fully Public Domain

60. Stop The Presses: Disney Tells Court About The Importance Of The Public Domain

61. From free to fee: How U.S. dailies decide to use paywalls

62. The long, twisted history of glitch art

jon

GAMES

1. ‘Turkey Not Banning Minecraft,’ Says Diplomat

+ Mojang Responds To Turkish Government’s Plan To Ban ‘Minecraft’

+ Turkish Ministry Recommends Banning Super-Violent Minecraft

2. Report: Mississippi deputy fired over threatening Xbox Live players: Offers racist slurs, home address, badge number during Call of Duty session.

3. GDC Awards Show Hosts Deliver Messages About Internet Hate

4. Massachusetts congresswoman urges FBI to take Gamergate seriously

5. Brianna Wu vs. the Troll Army: She set out to transform the video gaming industry by creating a hit game aimed at female players. Then came Gamergate. And the harassment. And the death threats.

6. The games industry is wrong about kids, gaming and gender

7. The People Who Make Brutal Video Game Porn

8. Video game bans: the debate about guns, GTA, and real-life violence

9. Australian Classification Board Turns To IARC To Streamline Ratings Process

10. Finally, African Fantasy Is Getting Its Own Gorgeous RPG

11. Intel Promises To Help Foster More Diversity in The Video Games Industry

12. Riot Games rated one of America’s top 15 places to work

13. CFP: Games for the Elderly, and the Representation of Aging in Video Games

14. Petition Call on Activision and Infinity Ward To Revamp ‘Modern Warfare 2’ for PS4, Xbox One

15. How Switzerland could be the model for better game communities

16. What is a gamer?

17. Comcast Blocks HBO Go on PlayStation Devices

18. PlayStation Network attacked “every day” – Yoshida

19. Swatting: It’s All Fun And Games Until Someone Gets Murdered

20. Majesco Hands Off Retail Publishing As Annual Shareholder Meeting Looms

21. Curt Schilling Speaks Out About the Failure of 38 Studios

22. A word on dealing with publishers: Don’t – Skulls of the Shogun dev Borut Pfeifer cautions indies against signing deals for marketing help, says many exist to leech value

23. The Rise Of Slow Gaming, Our Cultural Antidote To Angry Birds

24. Blizzard offers college tuition in new eSports tournament

25. Minecraft’s Markus Persson Tells All On His Sale To Microsoft, His $70 Million Home

26. VR sickness cannot be solved by hardware improvements alone: Walt Disney Imagineering’s Bei Yang points to game design as an ever present risk of sickness in virtual reality

27. Why video game engines may power the future of film and architecture: The original developer of Gears of War has an ambitious plan for the future of everything

28. History of Video Games (1950-1980)

29. The Merging of Artist and Audience: How Games will Redefine Fame

30. On killing virtual dogs

DIGITAL

31. Free to Be You and Me? Copyright and Constraint (Rebecca Tushnet)

32. 13-24 Year Olds Watching More YouTube Than TV – To The Surprise of No-one

33. U.S. NSA sued by Wikimedia, rights groups over mass surveillance

34. New smoking gun further ties NSA to omnipotent “Equation Group” hackers: What are the chances unrelated state-sponsored projects were both named “BACKSNARF”?

35. Je suis Charlie sentiment fades amid calls to tame free speech

36. Everyone Wants You To Have Security, But Not From Them (Bruce Schneier)

37. Why I’m Saying Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft: I’m putting more trust in communities than corporations (Dan Gillmor)

38. Two weeks on, Superfish debacle still causing pain for some Lenovo customers: Assurances on the demise of the dangerous adware are (somewhat) exaggerated.

39. Attack Attribution and Cyber Conflict

40. Misuse of Canada’s Copyright Notice System Continues: U.S. Firm Sending Thousands of Notices With Settlement Demands (Michael Geist)

+ More Copyright Trolls Rushing In To Take Advantage Of Canadian Copyright Notice System Loopholes

41. Here’s why patents are innovation’s worst enemyMPAA Abusing DMCA Takedowns To Attempt A Poor Man’s SOPA

42. Federal Court finds meta tags do not infringe trademarks or copyright

43. Trial Court Doesn’t Unmask Parodist Twitterers

44. CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians

45. How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront

46. This Is What It’s Like To Go To Prison For Trolling: In January 2014, two people were found guilty of sending death and rape threats to the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez in the most high-profile online abuse case Britain has yet seen. 

47. WordPress Wins Case Against DMCA Abuser… Who Ignored The Proceedings

48. Will the FTC ever drop the hammer on paid Wikipedia edits?

49. Following the Digital Breadcrumbs: How to distinguish online nutcases from honest-to-God villains.

50. Spanish Court Limits Scope Of EU’s Right To Be Forgotten

51. Facebook post written in Florida lands US man in United Arab Emirates jail: Mechanic accused of slandering his employer, which is illegal in the Emirates.

52. Sofia Vergara Successfully Shuts Down “Fan Site” Via UDRP Proceeding

53. Europe reverses course on net neutrality legislation: EU member states have voted in favor of allowing the prioritization of “specialized” services.

54. MySpace – what went wrong: ‘The site was a massive spaghetti-ball mess’: Former VP of online marketing Sean Percival on corporate interference, Punch The Monkey, and a failed attempt to buy Spotify

55. Top 10 emerging technologies of 2015

56. Cognitive Technology: The rise of “bionic brains”

57. Licensing Your 3D Printed Stuff: Why 3D Printed Objects Challenge Our Copyright Beliefs

58. Why No One’s Talking About ‘Cord-Forevers’

59. Why It’s Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry

CREATIVITY

60. The End of Creativity: The word “creativity” was made up less than a hundred years ago. It is time to stop using it.

61. Raising the Broadcast White Flag: What Lies Behind Bell’s Radical Plan to Raise TV Fees, Block Content, Violate Net Neutrality & Fight Netflix

62. Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke to pay $7.4m to Marvin Gaye’s family over Blurred Lines: Jury decides Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke copied 1977 hit Got to Give It Up in lawsuit filed by Gaye’s children

+ The Blurred Lines Decision

+ Jury Says Robin Thicke And Pharrell Infringed… Even If They Didn’t Mean To: Told To Pay $7.3 Million

+ How the ‘Blurred Lines’ case could have chilling effect on creativity

63. What The Law Really Says About Music Plagiarism: How you think about music ≠ how the courts think about music.

64. What We Talk About When We Talk About Crediting Photographers

65. Bryn Geffert On Securing Rights

66. India Threatens BBC Over Decision To Air Rape Documentary In U.K.

+ Indian Government Attempts To Censor BBC Gang Rape Documentary; Succeeds Only In Drawing More Attention To It

67. We can’t rely on corporations like Fox to care about ethics in journalism

68. Jury Decides Village People ‘Y.M.C.A.’ Songwriter Has 50 Percent Song Share

69. 2 Hockey Players And Elisha Cuthbert Want Cash From A TV Station For Airing A Joke Tweet

70. Liability may lurk in the vitriol of reader comments

71. Media mergers and the Competition Bureau: is the medium the market? 

72. Rise Of The Robot Sportswriter: Now that the AP has announced that it will outsource sports stories to artificial intelligence, we can expect lots of freezing #ColdTakes!

73. What It’s Like Publishing My Entire Book on Medium

jon

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