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.

Comments

Christ, get a life

[p3d0]

You're going to sign a petition to make him change the name from "Attack of the Clones"? Really, is that any worse than "The Empire Strikes Back"?

I swear, Lucas can do nothing right anymore.

Grammar Nazi, again.

[sudotcsh]

Good god. Did they let Cmdr Taco write that petition? How do they expect Lucas to take it seriously when there are apostrophe issues everywhere?!

I refer them to this handy guide: Bob The Angry Flower's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots

Hopefully that'll clear things right up.

---

Re:Grammar Nazi, again.

[Fat Casper]

Eat shit; billions of flies can't be wrong.

Sorry- I meant billion's.

It does depress me that to avoid lowering the self esteem of million's of illiterate's, we need to condone their mistake's. These are prople that can't even find their (there?) country on a map two out of three time's. I'm all for language evolving, but I refuse to follow the lead of the hillbilly's. I suppose that after a few more generation's of homeschooling these folk's will be writing Webster's for us. I think I'll just move to Canada and speak French. They might have stupid idea's about language, but they're better than your's.

There are better things to petition

[Anonymous Coward]

There are better things to petition than the name of the next star wars. Sorry, but they screwed you on the last one -- now is the time to give in.

What might be better? Well, for one:
Anti-DMCA Petition:
http://www.dibona.com/dmca/

Programmers speak in Code.
http://www.anti-dmca.org

You really need to start acting or there won't be any net...

Dragonball Foxed? No, stupid developers

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

Let's face it: if you know it's someone else's property, why spend thousands of hours doing development without securing permission to use it?

Stupid people get no sympathy here.

(Karma, goodbye...)

Attack of the Clones

[csbruce]

Well, movies frequently have fake names while they are still in production. ROTJ was once called "Revenge of the Jedi" while it was still in production. In any case, Lucas should have embellished the title a little more to "Attack of the Killer Clones from Outer Space", though hopefully it won't be quite that hokey (cross fingers).

Re:Bloody Petition

[Compuser]

IMHO, the reason why people complain about lame content in Ep. 1 is because they ... grew up. I came to the US when I was a grown up and saw Star Wars episodes for the first time when I was older than 20. I see no difference between the episodes in terms of quality. How is an animated Jamaican-spouting goon worse than a metal wizard-of-oz'ish charicature of a robot, or a rolling trash bin with blinking lights? I am not trying to troll, I am just saying that SW is aimed at kids and is not bad in that realm. Ep. II will probably not deviate from this money making scheme, but where is the grief?