Can Michael Jackson bring music games back from the dead?
The French video game company is launching the first Michael Jackson dance video game for the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, and Sony PlayStation Portable on Nov. 23. Versions for the Microsoft Kinect and Sony PlayStation Move the new motion-sensing systems for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 will be available in early 2011. To stoke sales, Ubisoft promises a special-edition white glove for anyone who pre-orders the Wii version or buys it on the first day. In the game, you learn a bunch of dance moves set to Michael Jackson’s biggest dance tunes.
As Sales Collapse, Music Games Gamble on Real Instruments
Photo by Megan Hodge
Two new games released this month attempt to break the mold. Power Gig: Rise of the SixString comes packaged with a real guitar that works as a game controller or plugs into an amp. Rock Band 3 will work with a real Fender Squier Stratocaster guitar that will ship in 2011, but for now it has a less-expensive controller with about 150 tiny buttons that simulate guitar strings. It also features a new instrument — keyboards. And the game’s pitch-accurate Pro modes are nearly identical to playing the real things.In short, if you’ve already mastered Expert mode, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Goodbye LimeWire?
A New York judge ordered LimeWire to stop distributing its file-sharing software, agreeing with the plaintiffs that LimeWire’s service is used “overwhelmingly for infringement.”
Judge Wood of U.S. District Court in Manhattan said that LimeWire “intentionally encouraged direct infringement” by users of its site, and also “marketed itself to Napster users, who were known copyright infringers.
The LimeWire site shut down its service Wednesday, displaying only a legal notice announcing that that company “is under a court-ordered injunction to stop distributing and supporting its file-sharing software.” Nonetheless, the company insisted that it has not been permanently put out of business.
Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project Asks Supreme Court To Rule On Constitutionality Of Restoring Copyrights In Foreign Works
Photo by Horia Varlan
Lawyers from Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project (FUP) and Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell LLP filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, asking the United States Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of a federal statute that removes thousands of foreign works from the Public Domain and places them under copyright protection. The FUP filed the petition on behalf of orchestra conductors, educators, performers, film archivists and motion picture distributors who relied for years on the free availability of works in the Public Domain, which they performed, adapted, restored and distributed. A 1994 amendment to the Copyright Act, the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), removed these works and many others from the Public Domain and placed them under copyright protection in conjunction with the implementation of intellectual property treaties. That amendment affected the copyright status of thousands of works by foreign authors that had been in the Public Domain in the United States for decades, including symphonies by Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich; books by C.S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells; films by Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean Renoir; and artwork by M.C. Escher and Pablo Picasso, including Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica.