Month: October 2016

Sam Machkovech

ELROY, Texas—The FIA has one shot a year to tell a Formula 1 story that's all America, apple pie, and loud cries of "yee-haw!" Currently, that takes place down the road from Austin, the Texas state capital, at the annual US Grand Prix. This past weekend, over 100,000 fans descended upon the barely developed town of Elroy, home of the Circuit of the Americas, to watch the world's fastest F1 racers. (The official attendance figure for the three-day event was 269,899.)

Thanks to random happenstance, I was one of them. What started as a cheap flight to visit relatives turned into my first live F1 race, complete with access to decent season-ticket seats and an experienced F1 fan at my side.

Enlarge / As far as early reviews of Dishonored 2 are concerned, the press' collective mouths will be as covered up as this protagonist's.

Not so long ago, you could be relatively sure that, if a publisher withheld early review copies from members of the press at large, it was probably because the publisher knew the game was a stinker that was going to get panned. Now, some of the biggest game makers are withholding early review copies as a matter of course, regardless of expected quality.

At least one of those publishers is being unusually upfront about communicating its policy to the public this week. In a blog post Tuesday evening, Bethesda Softworks Global Content Lead Gary Steinman writes that "with the upcoming launches of Skyrim Special Edition and Dishonored 2, we will continue our policy of sending media review copies one day before release." For massive games like these, that one-day lead time might as well be nonexistent, from the standpoint of putting together a review in time for launch.

The closest thing Bethesda offers to a reason for this policy is that the company "want[s] everyone, including those in the media, to experience our games at the same time." That justification is a little hard to swallow, considering that Bethesda sent an enthusiastic streamer a copy of Skyrim Special Edition a full month before its release. Apparently, "everyone [playing] at the same time" doesn't include YouTubers that Bethesda can be relatively sure will react with pants-wetting excitement to special, early access to its game.

MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson in 2006. (credit: JD Lasica)

The website MP3tunes.com is long gone now, but a legal battle between the EMI record label and MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson slogs on. The site, created as a kind of digital music locker, shuttered in 2012, but EMI still pushed forward with its lawsuit. In 2014, following a jury trial, Robertson and MP3tunes were slapped with a verdict of $41 million plus punitive damages, finding the CEO personally liable for copyright infringement on the site. The judge later whittled damages down to $12.2 million, following post-trial motions. Both sides appealed elements of the judgment.

Now, Robertson has lost his best chance for a comeback. In an opinion (PDF) released yesterday, a panel of judges at the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit not only didn't clear MP3tunes of the copyright charges, it found that the district court had been too lenient when it found that some of the website's behavior was protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions.

The DMCA provides a safe harbor from copyright lawsuits for websites that follow certain guidelines and assist copyright owners in stopping infringement. That includes having policies that terminate "repeat infringers," which MP3tunes did more than 150 times. EMI lawyers said that Robertson blew off other obvious infringers, but on that issue, the district court judge sided with Robertson, holding that users who used the website's "sideload.com" search engine to hunt for freely available MP3 files "for their personal entertainment" couldn't be repeat infringers.

We woke up to some rather sad—if not unexpected—news from Germany this morning. Audi's long-running and extremely successful endurance racing program will draw to a close at the end of this year, and its diesel-powered hybrid race cars will no longer compete at Le Mans (or anywhere else). Instead, the company will concentrate on Formula E, the electric vehicle racing series, although that program will not race until 2018.

The decision was announced to Audi's motorsports department earlier on Wednesday morning by the company's chairman, Rupert Stadler. "We’re going to contest the race for the future on electric power. As our production cars are becoming increasingly electric, our motorsport cars, as Audi’s technological spearheads, have to even more so," he said.