News of the Week; January 13, 2016

Games

1. Will Supreme Court tackle 1st Amendment issue in Madden NFL litigation?: Expression in movies, plays, books, music, and video games hangs in the balance.
2. Virtual Casino Doesn’t Violate California’s Gambling Law–Mason v. Machine Zone
3. Fake Minecraft sequel pulled from App Store
4. Just Cause 3 prompts despair among Chinese pirates
5. Major piracy group warns games may be crack-proof in two years: The never-ending game-cracking battle may be tilting toward digital protection.
6. Nintendo claims fanboy’s YouTube video, fanboy extends middle finger
7. Canadian father gets nearly $8K credit card bill for FIFA purchases
8. “I am not a terrorist”: Muslim man barred from playing Paragon beta – Florida professor shows up on government terror watchlist, can’t sign up to play.
9. Sony fails to secure “Let’s Play” trademark: Refused by USPTO because “consumer confusion is likely”
10. Sony Just Tried To Trademark ‘Let’s Play’ And Failed For The Wrong Reason
11. Luckey: “I handled the messaging poorly” – Oculus founder apologises for pricing shock, but maintains that “we don’t make money on the Rift”
12. Oculus must open the warchest and show us the software: $600 makes Oculus Rift into a platform, not a gadget – and that makes it absolutely essential that Oculus prove its worth in software
13. Oculus: PlayStation VR addresses “a separate market”
14. VR game devs ready for a slow launch after $599 Oculus Rift reveal: Early-bird studios prepared for a long wait before VR reaches the mainstream.
15. Oculus open to subsidizing Rift in the future
16. Oculus founder: “Your crappy PC is the biggest barrier to [VR] adoption” – Luckey says demand will force down the costs for VR’s underlying hardware.
17. A negative-sum game: Policing Counter-Strike: GO cheaters with Overwatch – In battling cheaters, Valve crowdsources the judge, jury, and executioner.
18. Xbox only hurting itself by refusing to share sales numbers: Microsoft’s fear of comparisons to the PS4 is taking focus away from the Xbox One’s considerable successes
19. EA launches $5 monthly subscription plan to access “vault” PC games
20. EA expands US parental leave policy
21. Marc Laidlaw retires from Valve: Half-Life writer confirms departure from studio after nearly 20 years
22. New approach by Valve pays dividends in Steam Winter Sale
23. Early Access angst? Why it’s OK to sell unfinished games
24. GameStop rakes in nearly $3 billion over holidays: New console sales and collectibles drive revenues up slightly; thin Nintendo lineup blamed for lower software sales
25. Report: game industry spent $629.2 million on TV ads in 2015
26. Xbox only hurting itself by refusing to share sales numbers
27. Games dominated the UK’s entertainment top 10 in 2015: Three of the top five were games, digital revenue rose by 17 per cent
28. Writers Guild of America doles out game nominations
29. How a game-playing robot coded “Super Mario Maker” onto an SNES—live on stage: Writing a level editor atop active code with the controller ports and 8KB of SRAM.
30. Norwegian high school puts e-sports and gaming on the timetable: Students will have five hours a week of reflex training, nutrition advice, and game study.
31. Research finds positive correlation between playing action video games and the acquired capability for suicide
32. That Dragon, Cancer: A game that wrestles with grief, hope, and faith
33. Razer to donate That Dragon, Cancer proceeds to charity

Digital

1. Appeals court upholds deal allowing kids’ images in Facebook ads
2. Yahoo settles e-mail privacy class-action: $4M for lawyers, $0 for users – Company won’t stop scanning e-mail for ads, but plaintiffs now seem unbothered.
3. Online Dating Services Must Give California Users a “Cooling Off” Period–Howell v. Grindr
4. German Publishers Still Upset That Google Sends Them Traffic Without Paying Them Too; File Lawsuit
5. European Court of Human Rights Rules Turkey’s YouTube Ban Violated Rights to Receive and Impart Information
6. Why Is The Federal Government Shutting Down A CES Booth Over A Patent Dispute?
7. ESPN Employees Keep Failing To Disclose Their Advertising Tweets As Advertising
8. The Trouble with the TPP, Day 4: Copyright Notice and Takedown Rules (Michael Geist)
9. The Trouble with the TPP, Day 5: Rights Holders “Shall” vs. Users “May” (Michael Geist)
10. The Trouble with the TPP, Day 6: The Price of Entry (Michael Geist)
11. The Trouble with the TPP, Day 7: Patent Term Extensions
12. Living in a Nonmaterial World: Determining IP Rights for Digital Data
13. ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site
14. The high-tech cop of the future is here today
15. Peak content: The collapse of the attention economy
16. Insiders say what’s going on inside $11 billion Pinterest — and it’s not all good
17. YouTube’s Robert Kyncl says digital video will trump TV by 2020
18. YouTube’s CES Keynote: Four Reasons Why Digital Video Will Win the Decade
19. Before Rachel Bloom was a Golden Globe winner, she was a YouTube star
20. Periscope Videostreams Now Appear — And Autoplay — Inside the Twitter App
21. Streaming Music Platforms Soar, Apple Surpasses 10M Subscribers
22. Netflix says it’s ‘not obvious’ how to limit use of VPNs
23. Virtual reality: A new frontier in journalism ethics
24. Virtual Reality Could Provide Healthy Escape for Homesick Astronauts
25. A Strategist’s Guide to Blockchain: The distributed ledger technology that started with bitcoin is rapidly becoming a crowdsourced system for verifying transactions of all types. Could it replace central banks, notary publics, and manual vote recounts?
26. Intel continues diversity initiative and announces new one to combat online harassment
27. Meltdown at Wikipedia?
28. Inside LaPresse+ Decisive and Final Move to Digital
29. Why Programmatic TV is Still Stuck in First Gear: TV industry slow to adopt digital ad practices, though certain tactics show promise
30. Bill Ford Isn’t Scared of Apple: Henry’s great-grandson explains how the automaker can become a software-driven service company that makes cars, too
31. People call me Aaron

Creativity

1. Court Finds Monkey Can’t Own Selfie Copyright
2. Monkey selfie case: judge rules animal cannot own his photo copyright – A San Francisco court said that while the protection of law could be extended to animals, there was no indication that it was in the Copyright Act
3. No Monkeying Around: Judge Rules That Animals Cannot Hold Copyrights, Do Not Have Standing to Sue 
4. Louis Vuitton Loses Trademark Lawsuit Over Joke Bag; Judge Tells Company To Maybe Laugh A Little Rather Than Sue
5. Why Radio Stations Probably Couldn’t Just Play David Bowie Music As A Tribute: Copyright Law Is Messed Up
6. Once Again, Piracy Is Destroying The Movie Industry… To Ever More Records At The Box Office
7. Hateful Eight Pirated Leak Harms Film All The Way To Box Office Records
8. Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels
9. The Case of the Missing Hong Kong Book Publishers
10. How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain
11. How much election influence does “the media” really have? Digging into the data
12. Devil Music: A History of the Occult in Rock & Roll – From The Beatles and the Stones to Led Zep, Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath, how the dark arts cast a spell on popular music

Communications

1. The Battle Over the Future of Broadband in Canada: Mayors Tory & Watson v. Nenshi (Michael Geist)
2. Zero for Conduct: On the surface, it sounds great for carriers to exempt popular apps from data charges. But it’s anti-competitive, patronizing, and counter-productive. (Susan Crawford)
3. With Fixed Costs And Fat Margins, Comcast’s Broadband Cap Justifications Are Total B.S.
4. T-Mobile Doubles Down On Its Blatant Lies, Says Claims It’s Throttling Are ‘Bullshit’ And That I’m A ‘Jerk’
5. John Legere asks EFF, “Who the f**k are you, and who pays you?”: T-Mobile CEO takes on digital rights group that objected to video throttling.
6. T-Mobile’s John Legere Goes Off The Deep End: ‘Who The F*** Are You, EFF?‘
7. T-Mobile to meet with FCC over Binge On
8. Streaming Video Company Drops Out Of BingeOn To Protest John Legere’s Attack On EFF; It Will Still Get Throttled, Though
9. John Legere apologizes to EFF for mocking group in throttling debate: “I am a vocal, animated, and sometimes foul-mouthed CEO,” T-Mobile boss says.
10. John Legere Just Can’t Stop The Misleading B.S. About BingeOn
11. What T-Mobile Is Really Doing And Why It Violates Net Neutrality
12. AT&T’s unlimited smartphone data is back—but only for TV subscribers: No tethering, and the $100 plan is only for DirecTV and U-verse TV customers.
13. AT&T Is Happy To Remove Wireless Broadband Caps, But Only If You Sign Up For Its TV Services
14. ISPs mad that FCC wants faster broadband deployment: FCC insists that US can do better, with 10 percent still lacking access.
15. House Rushes To Gut FCC Authority To Prevent Inquiry Into Comcast Broadband Caps
16. Settlement Reached In Class Action Lawsuit Against Rightscorp For Robocalls
17. CASL – year in review
18. Canadian Anti-Spam Enforcement 2015: A Year in Review
19. Replacing Judgment with Algorithms (Bruce Schneier)

Surveillance & Privacy

1. Two months after FBI debacle, Tor Project still can’t get an answer from CMU
2. Saudi Arabia Arrests Samar Badawi for Tweeting on Behalf of Her Jailed Husband
3. Juniper drops NSA-developed code following new backdoor revelations: Researchers contradict Juniper claim that Dual_EC_DRBG weakness couldn’t be exploited.
4. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo slag Snooper’s Charter: US Internet companies warn that harmful moves by the UK will have global impact.
5. Canadian Cops Can Decrypt PGP BlackBerrys Too
6. The Internet of Things that Talk About You Behind Your Back (Bruce Schneier)
7. The risks — and benefits — of letting algorithms judge us (Bruce Schneier)
8. US Intelligence director’s personal e-mail, phone hacked

jon