Thoughts

Legal Contradictions Manifest in Video Game Worlds: Copyright through the Post-Structuralist Looking Glass

In the spring I was invited by my colleague Gaetano Dimita (http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/staff/dimita.html) of The School of Law, Queen Mary University of London to participate in the second edition of an academic conference he organizes called “More Than Just A Game: Interactive Entertainment & Intellectual Property Law”. The conference, which took place on April 8, 2016 […]

Pitblado Lectures talk

On Friday November 6, 2015 I was honoured to be invited to be on a panel and give a talk at the Pitblado Lectures  in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This 55th edition of the Pitblado Lectures was put on by the Law Society of Manitoba, The Manitoba Bar Association, and The University of Manitoba Faculty of Law […]

UNESCO Convention Roundtable Video

The video of my short presentation on “Relevance for Creative Digitization & the Internet” at the “Roundtable on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions – Impacts and Implications of the UNESCO Convention Ten Years After and Ten Years Ahead: The View From BC” at Simon Fraser University, February 25, 2014 has been posted and can be […]

Randomizing Someone Else’s Creativity as a Form of Creativity

A few nights ago, I saw a friend of mine from Utah, USA, whom I know from a previous video game charity event (Darkwing_Duck_SDA on Twitter), playing a randomized version of The Legend of Zelda. For those of you who haven’t played the original Zelda for NES (I hope I’m not aging myself too badly as the resident […]

Game of Thrones Piracy

The first four episodes of Season 5 of Game of Thrones were leaked early online.  Interestingly, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes has stated: “Our experience is [piracy] leads to more penetration, more paying subs, more health for HBO, less reliance on having to do paid advertising… If you go around the world, I think you’re right, Game […]

Online Shaming or Sadistic Trolling

There was an article in the Globe and Mail earlier this week about online shaming, including a discussion of sadism as an inherent character trail. I thought it tied in well to some of our discussions in class; plus, it’s an interesting read as a study break 🙂 Cheers!

John Oliver with Edward Snowden

Here is the John Oliver interview with Edward Snowden that was mentioned in class today. Hilarious, sad, and insightful — all in one.  

Who Owns Your Data (Hint: It’s Not You)

Cool little animation from Jorge Cham, interviewing Irene Ng and David Reynolds from Hub of All Things: http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1788 Cheers!

An Older Version of the Four-Chord Song

I thought I’d break from my usual raving rants-about-cryptography-style posts, and just share something a little funny with everyone. If you enjoyed the Four-Chord Song video from yesterday’s class (for people who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I ), here’s one going all the way back to the 1600’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM Enjoy 🙂

Rogers Calls for End to VPNs

At a conference on 26 February 2015, a Rogers executive called for the Canadian government to shut down VPNs. Here is Dr. Michael Geist’s take on the matter. VPNs, or “virtual private networks”, are a technology used to securely link two physically non-connected networks, and make it is as though the two were one seamless network […]