The final report on the Open Badges Video Game Law Project is out. At least in a preliminary way it shows that badges created a significant jump in website engagement. The deeper question is always “Why?” There are several Open Badges projects happening at UBC this semester so we should know more soon. The infographic replicated above and some additional commentary makes for very interesting reading, and can be found here: Video Game Law 423B Final Pilot Project Report | Open Badges.
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
6. Survey: 45% of the UK industry’s women feel gender is a “barrier”
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)
+ More Surveillance Won’t Protect Free Speech
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
+ Free Our Paywalled Court Documents: The Aaron Swartz Memorial PACER Cup Contest Announced
26. Sony Pictures CEO: call to Google got ‘The Interview’ out
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
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
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”
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
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
Here is my take on Sony Corporation – an enigma wrapped in a riddle from personal experience…
jon
Are Let’s Play Videos Illegal? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios – YouTube.
Doesn’t get any more self-explanatory as a subject. No easy answers yet – but would make for a wonderful fair dealing/use test case.
jon
Papers graded, marks in. It’s time to say don’t be a stranger. But more than that it’s time to thank everyone in the eighth cohort of Video Game Law for your focus during class, your contributions between classes to the website, and the creative efforts represented by your research papers.
In my “welcome” post on September 2, 2014 (http://videogame.law.ubc.ca/2014/09/02/welcome-to-the-8th-cohort-of-video-game-law-ubc/) I asked “So what will be this years emergent themes? Impossible to know sitting here the night before class starts. All we can know is that in a year where the new generation of consoles find their feet, where the demographics of gamers has changed forever thanks to mobile devices, and where Facebook pays $2 Billion U.S. to purchase Oculus Rift, somethings gotta give…”
Looking back over the semester three emergent themes stood out for me:
1. #Gamergate was huge of course. For some in the public debate there seemed to be much confusion, as if magic circle concepts that might protect certain aspects of gameplay in limited circumstances, might apply to prevent legal and ethical culpability for direct intimidation, bullying and threats against Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn (and others). Thanks to the impact of first year law school, there seemed little doubt in anyones mind that we all live in one big world, of which the “virtual world” is but a part, and that the criminal law has jurisdiction over all of it. Of course at this point we don’t know the outcome of the ongoing criminal investigations – so that may provide fodder for next years class.
2. Introducing a post-structuralist analysis of video-games and finding that it fit rather well was the surprise of the semester. Most significantly having a coherent theory of how video-games really function in society has some practical benefits. It provided wonderful touchpoints with which to analyze whether the layers of legal and normative constraints applying to games makes sense or not. It was extremely gratifying to realize how many times these ideas showed up in posts, emails and even quite a few final papers. Trying to really understand the writings of Jacques Derrida remains for me an enigma wrapped in a riddle – making it all the more fun. There is indeed a lot of “play” in that system (pretty pathetic when I’m trying to make post-structuralist inside jokes isn’t it? 😉
3. Our Oculus Rift class demonstrated that virtual reality has the potential to powerful and go far beyond games, and could have real uses in education. My thought going in was that the limitations of the technology would become obvious and we might be reminded that oftentimes things are over-hyped. That was decidedly not the case in our classroom experiment. Once again games are the bleeding edge of technology that eventually moves to broader pastures. This has happened before. Think “voice over IP” as an example, though there are many others.
Now that this edition of the course is done there are a lot of games to go through before the 9th cohort arrives. The picture at the top of this post represents “research” to be done…
Thanks again for a truly great semester.
jon
GAMES
1. EA Loses Appeal in Madden NFL 09 Lawsuit
+ Lawsuit Over Use Of Former NFL Players’ Likeness In Madden Moves Forward
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
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
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
23. Netflix Helps You Trick Kids Into Thinking Midnight Came Early With An On-Demand Countdown
24. The Cybersecurity Tipping Point
27. Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo is a case study in the toxic nature of stack ranking
28. What Was Ello?
30. ‘I emailed a message between two brains’
31. Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer
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)
jon
A UBC FIREtalk with Kate Chandler on Open Badges in Academia | Open Badges.
Why did badges work as effectively as they did this semester in Video Game Law? Especially without any particular marketing or other push. Kate Chandler who is part of our UBC badges group raises that question among others in this thoughtful audio interview.
jon
I’m posting my final paper here in the spirit of the open access to information modelled by this class. The paper explores the potential application of labour law principles of collective bargaining to solve some of the problems with common contracts used in the videogame industry. Drawing heavily from ideas discussed in class, the paper also touches on current developments in the law and other potential solutions to some of the more troubling issues with videogame contracts. Law 423B Video Game Law Paper MC
GAMES
1. Hackers Take Credit For PlayStation Network And Xbox Live Outages On Christmas
+ 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
DIGITAL
11. How Laws Restricting Tech Actually Expose Us to Greater Harm (Cory Doctorow)
12. How Copyright Makes Culture Disappear
+ Facebook May be On the Hook for Scanning Private Messages for Links
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
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
+ Who’s Behind The Internet Outages In North Korea, Anyway?
+ How ‘The Interview’s’ VOD grosses could change the game
+ Sony’s Own Copyright Infringement Shows How Broken Our Copyright System Is Today
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
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
“joss” wrote a great and most appreciated post titled “Future Reflections” which can be found here: http://videogame.law.ubc.ca/2014/11/26/future-reflections/ In the post she makes several well taken observations about where the course and it’s pedagogic approach could lead. That post made me think about what the future opportunities for Video Game Law might be. Since the course will be offered again in September 2015, what follows are some early thoughts on what could come next. Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.
So what follows are a bunch of ideas, some far-fetched and some almost inevitable. To make matters more confusing they are in no particular order other than the order they came to mind…
1. UBC Video Game Law Wiki: In the unfinished business category, it would be great to finish creating a useable UBC Wiki on Video Game Law accessible through this website where students could voluntarily post their papers and any contributions they wish. With the help of the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology that almost got done this semester and may yet make it up in January 2015.
2. Badges 2.0: Badges were a very low key experiment this past semester. The data shows that it was a very successful one. In a course where the stated pedagogic metaphor is to emulate an open world role playing game where students are provided with terrains to explore and tools to explore them with, badges have some potentially fascinating applications. They can be used as virtual maps to individual goals. For example a badge that maps a students progress through materials relating to copyright issues, or freedom of expression, or EULA problems, or you name it. Badges can certainly be for more then posts and comments and it would certainly be cool to see what achievement maps could be created that students could voluntarily explore if they were interested and inclined.
3. Video Game Law open and scalable curriculum: Will mention this here because oddly enough it is an outgrowth of our UBC badges group. Video game courses and programs are one of the fastest growing areas in higher education. An embryonic idea that has been discussed with the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology is the possibility of building a digital tool for teachers who want to include some legal aspects in their video game courses or programs. The tool would allow teachers to create their own video game law curriculum from the rather large amount of material already on this website and allow for scalability from one class all the way to an entire course. Remember this tool is not aimed at law schools but rather at post-secondary institutions that offer degrees relating to videogame/digital media studies to artists, creators, programmers, computer scientists etc.
4. Oculus Rift 2.0: Perhaps the biggest surprise of the semester was how well the Oculus Rift experiment went in terms of real-life pedagogic potential. What would be wonderful would be to take the next step with the tech and try and incorporate feedback loops between the “live” classroom and the “Rift” classroom that would make the experience seamless in both venues.
5. Doubling Up: In a way this idea flows from the Oculus Rift experiment. During the first year of Video game Law (we just finished 8th edition of the course) and owing to some unusual circumstances, the course was offered in two Law Schools (UBC & UVic) as a single course. The two classrooms were video-conferenced together and I would alternate my physical presence on a weekly basis between the two schools. It worked out really well. Now that was roughly 1o years ago, used relatively unsophisticated technology and had no website. So perhaps I might be forgiven for wondering whether something along the lines of joining two(or more) law school classes might be worth trying again.
6. Website Accessibility: One of the most gratifying aspects of the course has been the way alumni have remained interested in the course and its progress. Another is the commitment and generosity of so many guest speakers. In a very real sense the course has an evolving community of interest. To make the most of that means making it as easy as possible for everyone to access and make meaningful contributions to this website. That is a continuing technological evolution. Hopefully next year we will be in a position where those who are interested can simply (but with approval) gain author status on the site. Building community and allowing past years students to stay involved if they wish would be a dream come true.
jon
Check out theVideos of Interest to Law 423 on YouTube 
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