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Month: January 2018

Molehill Mountain Episode 81 – No Rush For Gravity Rush 2

Why pay full price for a video game when you can pay full price for HALF a video game?

0:02 – Emergency system accidentally sends out a false alarm that a missile is on its way to Hawaii

8:54 – We start the show! I played the Dragon Quest Builders demo and EZK watched The Punisher on Netflix

40:29 – Half of the new BlazBlue game’s characters will be paid DLC

49:40 – Sony postpones shutting down Gravity Rush 2’s servers until July

59:15 – Swatter who got Kansas man killed charged with manslaughter

1:05:53 – Western localization of Detective Pikachu announced

1:10:10 – We discuss everything announced during Nintendo’s recent Direct

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Molehill Mountain Episode 80 – Kunkel Awards, Year 3

The SPJ’s Kunkel Awards, celebrating excellence in video game journalism, is back for its third year. New director of the awards, Brittany Ferrendi, joins us to discuss the Kunkels and extol the splendiferousness of The Witcher 3.

Check out the awards here: https://www.spj.org/kunkel.asp

2:06 – Brittany’s favorite game of 2017

7:14 – Andrew’s favorite game of 2017

11:45 – EZK’s favorite game of 2017

21:20 – We discuss the Kunkel Awards

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Molehill Mountain Episode 79 – All About the Kugel

Swatting got someone killed last week.  It’s an unpleasant topic and one we spend the first part of the show yammering about anything and everything to avoid it.  But, as former GamePolitics writers, we felt we needed to discuss it.

46:00 – Gamers kill someone via swatting

1:13:08 – Copyright extensions keep hundreds of games from entering the public domain this year

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Molehill Mountain Episode 78 – FCC Say What Now?

Tonight is a solo show with E. Zachary Knight. So join me as I discuss the Net Neutrality vote by the FCC, Patreon’s fee fiasco, PlayerUnknown’s odd misunderstanding of Intellectual Property law, and more.

21:10 – PlayerUnknown’s misunderstanding of IP law
34:01 – Patreon’s terrible fee change and reversal
48:43 – FCC votes to end net neutrality
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2018 Is The Last Public Domain Day The US Will Miss Out On

January 1st of each year is what is colloquially referred to as Public Domain Day. It is the day that works enter the public domain after their copyright terms have expired. At least in most countries outside the US. The US has gone decades without anything entering the public domain, but thankfully, 2018 will be the last year this is so. Unless Congress succumbs to the whims of the Motion Picture Industry and extends copyright again.

Every year, the Duke Law School publishes a report about the state of the public domain on January 1st and this year is no exception. This is what Duke had to say about the US.

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Not a single published work. Once again, no published works are entering our public domain this year.2 (Happily, works published in 1923 will finally begin to enter our public domain next year.) The only works that are clearly in the US public domain now are those published before 1923. But what about works published after that date? Does that mean that they’re still under copyright? Well, maybe. Citizens of the United States have to live with a frustrating lack of clarity about what older works they can use. Did the author comply with registration or renewal requirements when those were mandatory?3 The records are fragmentary and confused, the copyright holders hard to find. Perhaps some post-1923 works by the authors above are in the public domain. Perhaps they are still copyrighted. We have to live in a fog of uncertainty, uncertainty that benefits no one. By contrast, in Canada and the EU, the public will know on January 1 that all works by these authors are in the public domain.

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