IP Law Book Review: \u3cem\u3eConfiguring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Every Day Practice\u3c/em\u3e

Julie Cohen\u27s Configuring the Networked Self is an extraordinarily insightful book. Cohen not only applies extant theory to law; she also distills it into her own distinctive social theory of the information age. Thus, even relatively short sections of chapters of her book often merit article-length close readings. I here offer a brief for the practical importance of Cohen’s theory, and ways it should influence intellectual property policy and scholarship

Regulating Habit-Forming Technology

Tech developers, like slot machine designers, strive to maximize the user’s “time on device.” They do so by designing habit-forming products— products that draw consciously on the same behavioral design strategies that the casino industry pioneered. The predictable result is that most tech users spend more time on device than they would like, about five hours of phone time a day, while a substantial minority develop life-changing behavioral problems similar to problem gambling. Other countries have begun to regulate habit-forming tech, and American jurisdictions may soon follow suit. Several state legislatures today are considering bills to regulate “loot boxes,” a highly addictive slot-machine- like mechanic that is common in online video games. The Federal Trade Commission has also announced an investigation into the practice. As public concern mounts, it is surprisingly easy to envision consumer regulation extending beyond video games to other types of apps. Just as tobacco regulations might prohibit brightly colored packaging and fruity flavors, a social media regulation might limit the use of red notification badges or “streaks” that reward users for daily use. It is unclear how much of this regulation could survive First Amendment scrutiny; software, unlike other consumer products, is widely understood as a form of protected “expression.” But it is also unclear whether well-drawn laws to combat compulsive technology use would seriously threaten First Amendment values. At a very low cost to the expressive interests of tech companies, these laws may well enhance the quality and efficacy of online speech by mitigating distraction and promoting deliberation

Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children's Software

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning This chapter draws on ethnographic material to consider the cultural politics and recent history of children's software and reflects on how this past can inform our current efforts to mobilize games for learning. The analysis uses a concept of genre as a way of making linkages across the distributed but interconnected circuit of everyday play, software content, and industry context. Organized through three genres in children's software -- academic, entertainment, and construction -- the body of the chapter describes how these genres play out within a production and advertising context, in the design of particular software titles, and at sites of play in after-school computer centers where the fieldwork was conducted

Big Data Management for MMO Games and Integrated Website Implementation

With the popularity and success of massively multiplayer Games (MMOGs), the development of MMOGS has got a quantum leap on game's contents and entertainment which attract huge number of players making MMOGs these years a big business which increased to billions of dollars revenue each year worldwide. But with this number of players and these game contents, the data volume produced from games has rapidly increased and used by simultaneously game players around the world. This data require high performance, fault tolerance and scalability. Considering all these demands the popular used relational database becomes a big challenge and cannot overcomes the challenges and cannot meet the requirements for MMOGS data storage. This paper focus on using big data technology tools to completely meet the requirement of MMO games. My work can be divided into two parts: the first part we proposed Cassandra database for MMO games data storing and the integration of Hadoop with Cassandra nodes for high performance in operations process. The second part: we implement a new MMO website with new payment methods, new advertisement program by friend2019;s invitations and other enhanced function. By implementing this website and comparisons of results of our database management, we show the applicability of our approach as well as the relative performance benefits of designing new games or website using our architecture