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Looks like Matthew Inman, the guy behind one of my favorite webcomic sites, The Oatmeal, has started whining about content aggregators. You know, those sites that compulsively gobble whatever they can find on the internet and spew it back with all kinds of advertising. I used to run into these all the time when googling [...]

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Remember Crysis? That mediocre first-person shooter with massive hardware requirements that turned “But can it run Crysis” into a phrase that still hasn’t left the geek culture consciousness? The studio behind the game, cleverly named “Crytek,” has been working on the sequel (scheduled for release in late March). An unfinished version has leaked online, prompting [...]

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As it becomes harder and harder to attack the logic of the CwF+RtB business model, I’ve seen a lot more people reaching for a kind of compromise or balance option. It goes something like, “Okay, I see how this model can work, but it should be the creator’s choice whether or not they use it.” [...]

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We’ve got our second test on Monday, so this week I’ve been more and more occupied with studying and preparing for that. In other words, I’m going to be less busy starting this coming Tuesday. Last week our good friend Kyle (formerly of this now-defunct blog, currently with no internet home sans Facebook) made good [...]

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Tess, my five year-old desktop PC, has been throwing all kinds of conniptions over the past few months. Macheads, I see your fingers poised over the keyboard: If you are interested in purchasing Apple’s overpriced hardware and gifting it to me,  I will gladly accept. Otherwise, silence.
Classes and my lab rotation are now in progress, [...]

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My love of Lego goes back nearly as far as I can remember – Lego sets were some of the first things I saved money to buy, and one of my brother’s early sentences was him asking me to “pay dupo” with him. I’ve spent years on staff at one of the biggest Lego community [...]

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Game modding communities thrive on the free exchange of knowledge that ranges from the developers adopting a mod-friendly attitude to the hobbyists who share their work and knowledge with comrades. The community thrives on clever innovation, on people picking up a project where others have left off, and on learning by imitation. Yet interestingly, the [...]

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Many of my budding artist friends appreciate their obscurity problem and want to share their work without the encumbrance of copyright. Yet they are worried about others using it for commercial purposes, the same fear that drives people like Cory Doctorow into the arms of Creative Commons licenses. This idea of somebody else, maybe a [...]

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Slowly, ever so slowly, some of the clear thinking with respect to filesharing and intellectual monopoly (imaginary property, if you will) is filtering into more mainstream channels. I was rather pleased to see these two pieces by Joe Konrath and David Gerrold; both say some excellent things before veering off into the content industry’s Bizarro [...]

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I just read a news post from Tim at CAD-Comic: Apparently, he searched the web for outfit ideas when creating a new character, and inadvertently based one off of some other artist’s painting. Since then it sounds like somebody came after him for “infringement,” and he’s gone back and changed every comic containing the artwork. [...]

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