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Slashback: Mods, Books, Checkmate

Slashback tonight with more book reviews, more on the Human vs. Machine Duel in the Desert, more on the Star Wars sequel name -- just generally more.

Quick, Danny, write faster! Danny Yee has written additional reviews of Jessica Litman's Digital Copyright , Naomi Klein's No Logo , and John Sundman's Acts of the Apostles . (You might want to flashback to earlier reviews of these by Michael Sims and Jon Katz, Warren A. Layton, and Hemos.)

From the Persian for "King" Frederic Friedel of Chessbase contributed some links which are especially interesting in light of the recently announced match between Deep Fritz and Vladimir Kramnik. He points to this link and this other link, saying "The latter has some nice quotes from Kramnik."

In addition, Frederic has links with more on Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, and Fritz in Space.

But the name is already perfect for a MAD parody ... RFINN writes: "If you haven't heard by now, Lucasfilm announced the name of Episode II. It's going to be called 'Attack of the Clones.' If you're like me, this stirs up pictures of Jedi running from giant red tomatoes and such. Do your civic duty and help change the name that has become the laughing stock of the sci-fi movie going community (and some of the actors themselves) by signing a petition to be sent to George Lucas."

Sold! to the man with the large contingent of lawyers! ncmusic writes "For all of you readers that have been following Bid For Power the DragonballZ Q3 mod. Funimation has issued a cease and desist order to the group. Funimation has excluse rights to DBZ in the US (and EU I think) and has sold exclusive video game rights to Infograms. Below is the announcement made on the site about the order. My question to the slashdot community is do you think this is fair? BFP is a FREE mod to an already existing game. Have their been any other precedence set for making mods based on characters from copyrighted work? And what advice do you have for the Bid For Power group?

'As many of you know Funimation owns the copyrights to Dragonball Z in the USA and has sold the exclusive rights to publish video games to Infogrames. On December 1st, 2000, the Bid For Power team received a cease and desist order from Funimation.

However, they seemed receptive to the notion of allowing Bid For Power to be released so long as certain conditions were met. We were put in touch with Infogrames who asked us, among other things, to recreate Bid For Power on Wild Tangent, a java-based engine, which would then be posted on the Dragonball Z website for people to play. This engine is incapable of running something as detailed as Bid For Power and we would have had to start work from scratch. Most of the team rejected the idea and talks went downhill from there. Without contact with Infogrames or Funimation the progress of Bid For Power slowed down even though we were sitting on a finished product and had been for some time.

We began dealing with Funimation directly in April when they asked us to send videos of gameplay to them so that they could have TOEI Japan review it. We sent the videos and heard nothing until we emailed them in July asking that we be allowed to release in August, since no objections had be made from TOEI Japan that we knew of. We were then sent another Cease and Desist order by way of Funimation.'"

So the confirmed-as-rumor rumor has become real? This is the sort of thing that would be best kept in the realm of rumor.

5 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Re:FU - no i insist FUCK YOU !!! by H310iSe · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Fark. I modded this as troll and it came out modded as funny. "Troll" isn't even near "funny" on the dropdown, I don't think I flob'd it. Anyway, um, metamod me *stands like a sacrifice* but know that, um, i don't think it was actually funny. *sigh*

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    closed minded is as closed minded does
  2. Where can I get it? by merchant_x · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Anybody know if a copy has been released into the wild? I would like to download it before it gets sued to oblivion.

  3. Re:DONT JUST MODE HIM - TERMINATE HIM by geekoid · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    All speech has rights. Even twits like him.

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    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  4. Y'know... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    Tthe "UPDATED" feature in Slash is there for a Reason. Why don't you slashdot-editor-people ever seem to *use* it?

    If you're going to put up a link to a petition which is closed *before a single comment has been posted*, then wouldn't it make sense to alter the article and note in it "oh, btw, you can't sign the petition anymore" ?

    What's up with this wierd aversion to updating the article to reflect important details that are A) in h2 type at the top of the link B) noted in cid #12 or so..? I mean, it isn't a big problem.. i'm just curious.

  5. Re:Java is a dead anguage by HDAMan · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Hey, there is nothing wrong with Latin, so lay off.

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    The truth is always there, whether or not you want to believe it.