A game called Palworld is taking the world by storm. This title has garnered 8 million downloads on Steam in less than 6 days, it also has become the second game in Steam history to hit over 2 million concurrent players. The game is a monster-collection-base-defence-crafting mash-up, you catch creatures Read more…
Text of my presentation at the IGF panel Videogames and their Uniting Power. Thanks very much to the organisers for the kind invitation to join this panel, it is an honour. I have to start with a disclaimer, I am just an academic who has been writing on the interface Read more…
Some eSports producers have started clamping down on unlicensed casts, and this could have an interesting effect on the profitable business, but it could also give us a hint about the copyright questions surrounding game broadcasting. For those unfamiliar with the subject, eSports are competitive encounters in which gamers team Read more…
Some of my favourite science fiction novels of recent years have featured augmented reality in one form or another: Pattern Recognition by Willam Gibson, Halting State by Charlie Stross, and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. I liked the ideas so much that I’ve been thinking about the legal implications of Read more…
This is not a post about Gamergate. I have been trying to stay out of the Gamergate discussion from the start, mostly because having missed a big part of the controversy, it has become increasingly more difficult to understand exactly what is going on, but also because I suspect that the Read more…
This weekend there was a sports event which was watched by 10,000 people live at a sports arena in Seattle, boasted millions of viewers online, was shown on ESPN, and the winners won an astounding $5 million USD. This was not golf, basketball, football or baseball, this was the final Read more…
A science fiction author has sued games company Ubisoft for copyright infringement in its wildly popular game series Assassin’s Creed. The plaintiff, one Mr John L Beiswenger, is asking for either $1,050,000.00 USD for infringement, or up to $5 million USD for wilful infringement of his novel Link. It would Read more…
(Via Greg Lastowka) The Criminal Division of the Supreme Court of the Netherlands has delivered a ground-breaking ruling which declares that virtual goods from the popular online player game Runescape are to be considered goods in accordance to Dutch law, and therefore are subject of theft and criminal enforcement (Google Read more…
The use of the loaded question may imply that I believe they should. I shall be frank and admit that this is precisely the intention of this post, but please allow me to explain my reasoning before you dismiss such a ludicrous notion. What inspired me to write this post Read more…
Sony has been in the news recently quite a lot in the IP front. First, they have been served with a serious injunction in Europe regarding a patent dispute with electronics giant LG involving the PS3 (Jas Purewal at Gamer/Law and Florian Mueller have been following the issue). Then Sony Read more…