Dying Sunflowers

Aside the train tracks mirror the thin shoulders and low-hung faces of
the commuters.

Mortgaging Futures

So the latest Skyrim add-on lets you adopt a family and build a house.
It is somewhat sobering to realize that the only way I can afford to
own property is to do it in a videogame.

The Pontification Situation

I remember, during a graduate school seminar, discussing an article
about a group of writers who went about the scientific process of
deconstructing the plots of Michael Crighton-like thrillers with the
goal of assembling the story elements necessary to create a best
seller. They identified a number of rules, most of which I can't
remember, like "the villain will have a predilection for puzzles" and
"a member of the hero's team will die horribly in the second act."

The apocryphal result was that these writers, who had previously been
struggling to publish anything, then sold their Frankenbook for a
multi-million dollar advance.

There is a business plan in there somewhere. I'll keep you posted.

Biff Pow Zat!

So, following up on the Olympics reality check, it's an appropriate
coincidence that the last Batman movie just came out. I haven't seen
it yet, but every time the character is discussed I'm reminded of
something I read once along the lines of "until they are about 30,
every guy secretly believes that if he devoted the next five years of
his life to Kung-fu and crime fighting, he could actually become
Batman."

What's funny is that, when you picture that idea in your head, it
actually seems a lot less absurd than the reverse: if Batman had to
do all the things in the average person's day. Batman with a
Baby-Bjorn, rocking back and forth in front of a Lakers game, ignoring
requests to do the dishes. Batman sitting through his quarterly
evaluation ("At target for efficiency. Opportunity for increased
development of customer service skills")

No, Batman cannot be a self-taught ninja-detective-badass and still be
someone's mid-level employee. Can't ever be accountable to anyone at
all, actually. The schema just won't fit.

Sure, you can have superheroes who schlep through a day job getting
chewed out by their boss (e.g. Peter Parker, at least until he married
a supermodel). But those characters are inevitably bumped into their
super humanity by a bolt of dumb luck. Radioactive spiderendiptiy.
They are who we think we could be in our lives if we just caught a
break.

But Batman is who we say to ourselves we could be if we just cast
aside our family and the rest of our petty human pursuits and devoted
ourselves to lives of precise and unwaivering vengeance. And a cool
black shirt just like Steve Jobs.

Hard Truths

At the close of every Olympics I go through the theoretical exercise
of assessing what sports, if I abandoned the whole of my life to the
pursuit, I could have any hope of competing in four years from now.
This time the list is down to fly fishing and darts.

Magic or the approximation thereof

Played Skyrim with the voice commands for the first time yesterday.
I'm pretty sure the girls thought I was some kind of wizard.

Cheap Suit Part 2: EA Terms of Service wouldn't completely prevent a lawsuit for banning players from multiplaye​r games

In another delayed post, I wanted to add a few points as to the law that would potentially come into effect regarding EA's  ban of customers' access to mutiplayer portions of EA games based on the content of their posts in the EA online forum.
One is that, even if EA's terms of service could potentially be read to permit what EA did, the company wouldn't necessarily be off the hook. An action taken under a contract can't itself violate the law, so there might be separate consumer protection violations (e.g.: that access to multiplayer features was advertised to entice sales of the product, and so cannot be arbitrarily revoked).

Second, even under a contract-law theory, EA would potentially owe players for the value of the service they paid for and are no longer receiving, or EA could be accused of unjust enrichment (basically, the legal equivalent of unfairness) or something similar.

The problem for players is that, though they might be in the right, the amount owed to each of them individually doesn't merit the cost of a lawsuit, so EA effectively wins. A class action can address this problem, but is only available in situations where everyone affected more or less suffers the same damage, because of the same facts (called "typicality" and "commonality").

That's why, for instance, the class action against EA's broken promise to include a digital copy of BF1943 for PS3 (based on the same clear promise to everyone, of an easily calculable damage amount) presumably had a decent shot at success, and so presumably settled (or was at least rendered moot) relatively quickly by EA's renewal of the original offer.

Of course, there would still be the issue of whether the particular terms of service would prohibit class actions (which, again, probably wouldn't have been an issue in the particular facts of the BF1943 case, given that the recinded offer was one that was made to the general public, not just users who were also subscribers to the EA online services).

Podcast the Commute: Suiting Up

This previously-recorded episode of The Commute covers some of the darker issues to come to light of the recent Blizzard v. Valve "DOTA" lawsuit.   I've been meaning to write a longer article about the diminished state of the mod scene.  I've written on the law governing mods and how they've caused a lot of these headaches.   A longstanding problem is that the early court cases governing mods came at a time when programmers' ability to alter the gameplay experience was extremely limited (such as speeding up the on-screen action.)   There obviously wasn't much "creative expression" possible in these first mods, and the courts didn't really consider that idea.  Consequently, modders still don't have any real legal right to mod or any ownership in their work and are potentially at the mercy of what developers allow.

I've argued that it would be more consistent for courts to view mods the same way that they view "cover" songs, which are specifically permitted by compulsory licensing under the Copyright Act and allow professional musicians to experiment with their own interpretations of an underlying composition.   (Gamepolitics picked up on this suggestion after it was published, and the type of "aspiring-professional-modder" licensing scheme I proposed anticipated a lot of the key features of Epic's current licensing scheme for the Unreal Development Kit (which, after a fairly recent change, doesn't charge developers until their game hits $50,000 in sales).  

Podcast the Commute: Use and Lose, Part 2

The second half of a discussion of recent events impacting copyright in the digital space.

Comments: podcastthecommute@gmail.com

Podcast the Commute: Use and Lose, Part 1

These past weeks have presented some interesting stories about how the intersecting effects of cloud storage, digital distribution, and copy protection are rapidly eroding long-standing expectations of the ways we can make use of copyrighted creative works--both others, and our own.

From Occupy Sopa, to Megauploadgate, to the vagaries of Steam, this episode of The Commute airs some initial thoughts on a state of affairs where, whether by government action or private end user license agreement, access to one's own information and lawfully made purchases can be severed without much practical recourse.

(And, in a bit of meta-commentary, the episode itself is also severed into two parts, due to a combination of technical inanity and my own reluctance to invest the time to figure out how to patch it back together).

Hope to be able to expand on this topic a little further in future posts.  As always, comments welcome at podcastthecommute@gmail.com

Podcast the Commute: Over the Counter Contemplations

In this tardily-posted episode of The Commute, a Benadryl-tinged mind makes associations that would likely not occur to a person in better health, including:

• How playing Skyrim with a three year old changes the game into a happily-getting-lost simulator
• The joys of slowly slowing reflexes and increasing sensitivity to motion sickness
• The mental health benefits of nicotine addiction
• Bonus!: live reports of a couple of mid-commute accidents

This is the first of a couple of overdue posts, so at least there's nowhere to go but up.

jb