Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you’ve likely caught wind of a rap beef that has taken the internet by storm. I won’t pretend to be enough of a pop culture expert to have any idea why both Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been lobbing frequent shots at each other in the form of diss tracks over the past couple of months, but it’s been fascinating to see how, and why, some have called this particular verbal battle “made for the internet.”

A great deal of that has to do with just how many Drake and Lamar memes already exist out there, such that they can be repurposed to make references to the current beef. Indeed, both artists themselves have gotten into that game somewhat, sharing memes of their own on the internet.

But that’s not the only way both are leaning into the internet culture side of this whole thing. It has been reported that both artists lifted copyright restrictions on the diss tracks that are flying back and forth specifically so that streamer personalities can post reaction videos to the tracks and keep this whole thing trending.

Kendrick Lamar and Drake have allegedly removed copyright stipulations from the diss tracks aimed at each other as the rap rivals’ war of words continues to grip social media.

This is fascinating for a couple of reasons. If you’re cynical like me, you may be wondering if all of this is a coordinated and manufactured situation designed to raise the profile of both artists. I would probably argue that neither of these artists really need that much lifting, but it’s also true that musicians like this definitely want and benefit from the public talking about them. If this is all some purposefully memefied “conflict,” it’s worked brilliantly.

And regardless of whether that’s the case or not, it’s equally interesting to watch two artists leave their copyrights to one side with the understanding that doing so will get the tracks, that they want people to hear, distributed more widely and trending with the internet crowd. All of that leads to the most obvious of questions: if it works for beef tracks, why doesn’t it likewise work for their music writ large?

In other words, why wouldn’t these two want to lift their copyright restrictions for reaction videos to their music entirely? It would serve the same purpose: to make the music more top of mind, relevant, and distributed thanks to the internet doing its thing. That would likewise lead to more interest in the music, in their concerts, and all the merch and other revenue streams that come along with it. Why is this plan fit for only diss tracks?

One hopes both artists, and maybe their respective labels, are paying attention to just how good this entire episode is for the exposure both artists are getting, regardless of whether the whole thing is as real as they are portraying it to be.

Here we go again. Back in February, the FTC wanted to dive back into its battle with Microsoft over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard due to Microsoft announcing thousands of jobs worth of layoffs, including many developers from Activision Blizzard. When the FTC had asked for an injunction to block the sale, Microsoft made two claims. First, it indicated that the injunction wasn’t needed as this was a horizontal acquisition, not a vertical one, meaning that it wasn’t going to reduce staff after the purchase due to redundancies in the workforce. Second, it indicated that the injunction wasn’t necessary due to the hands-off approach Microsoft would take at these studios, meaning that it could easily divest from these developers if ordered to, rather than having to shut them down entirely. Post acquisition, Microsoft went right ahead and announced plans to lay off nearly 2,000 people, rather than doing any divesting. A complete one-eighty from what it told the courts, in other words.

And one that may be part of a larger effort, considering Microsoft also just closed up several developers that came over in the Bethesda acquisition as well.

Microsoft has closed a number of Bethesda studios, including Redfall maker Arkane Austin, Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within developer Tango Gameworks, and more in devastating cuts at Bethesda, IGN can confirm.

Alpha Dog Games, maker of mobile game Mighty Doom, will also close. Roundhouse Studios will be absorbed by The Elder Scrolls Online developer ZeniMax Online Studios. Microsoft, currently valued at over $3 trillion, did not say how many staff will lose their jobs, but significant layoffs are inevitable. IGN has asked Bethesda for comment. Microsoft declined to expand further when contacted by IGN.

Now, layoffs across the video game industry occurred throughout 2023 and into 2024, so it’s not as if Microsoft is alone in this. On the other hand, Microsoft is also, obviously, one of the largest players in the gaming space, with the largest revenue streams coming in from multiple avenues in the industry, and it just shelled out billions and billions of dollars to acquire a massive portfolio of gaming companies and franchises. For the coda to all of that to amount to Microsoft both laying off thousands of people and to pretend it’s sticking to its claim that this isn’t somehow a consolidation of roles resulting from cuts to redundancy post-acquisition is absolutely silly.

And while Microsoft and Bethesda may not be commenting publicly about all of this, the wider gaming industry certainly is.

“This is absolutely terrible,” tweeted Bakaba, co-creative director at the remaining Arkane studio, in the wake of the news. “Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.”

And, to harken back to an earlier claim Microsoft made to combat the injunction the FTC wanted, some are questioning why these studios had to be closed to begin with.

It’s a fair question, given Microsoft’s previous claims. If the company isn’t interested in the games, franchises, and other work these studios are doing, why not divest? The answer is, because in many cases, Microsoft is interested in those things and is simply going to fold them into other parts of its gaming infrastructure.

And before anyone wants to chime in that there are broader economic forces at work that are causing Microsoft to trim any supposed fat, that’s certainly not represented in Microsoft’s overall numbers.

No, it’s far more likely that this is simply the result of lies and greed at work. Lies to the courts and FTC about what its plans were all along, and greed propelling layoffs and studio closures purely to shift their previous efforts to Microsoft teams that are already in place and established.

One would hope the FTC is paying attention.

We’ve been talking a lot about video game mods recently, typically not for happy reasons. There is a spectrum out there when it comes to how developers and publishers react to organic modding communities that spring up around their games. On one end of the spectrum, typically inhabited by larger companies, are those that somehow see mods as a threat to the game to be combatted and tamped down by any means possible. On the other end are the more reasonable folks, those who realize that modding communities represent some of the most passionate fans of their games, and that mods often times make games more attractive for purchase, or extend their gameplay lifecycle.

We’ve recently seen companies like Bandai Namco, The Pokémon Company, and Rockstar go to war with their own modding communities. It’s that larger climate that makes it so refreshing to see the developer behind the latest hit PC game, Manor Lords, go so far as to praise at least one mod for their game.

Manor Lords is a city building game with a third-person camera view. One modding community, Flat2VR, dedicates itself to making non-VR games playable in a VR format. And they did so with Manor Lords.

The community’s Twitter account announced the achievement, saying: “Seven years in development, Manor Lords was the most wish-listed Steam game & released in EA this past week. It has the highest concurrent user counts ever on a city builder. Thankfully, it works perfectly in 6DOF VR with Praydog’s UEVR!” They also confirm that the mod uses M&K, but with Demeo or Little Cities-like motion controls to help players navigate their budding villages and towns. 

The short video attached alongside the announcement also shows how this VR mod allows you to do pretty much everything you’d normally do in Manor Lords, including building roads, managing resources, and walking around the streets as the Lord you’ve chosen to embody. 

Imagine how the companies I mentioned before might react to something like this. Bandai Namco might just issue takedowns for the mods without explanation. The Pokémon Company would probably just scream “INFRINGEMENT!!!” while doing likewise. Rockstar could issue takedowns over some potential paid expansion pack including VR or some such nonsense.

But if you’re the developer of Manor Lords, your reaction is pretty much, “No shit? That works? Cool!”

To quote some of us from ten years ago: that’s it, that’s the tweet. Or X. Or whatever.

In any case, you will notice that the developer didn’t then follow up with a threat of a takedown, discussions of intellectual property laws, or really any hand-wringing whatsoever. Nope, just an acknowledgement of an awesome mod on the game’s official ExTwitter account.

It sure would be nice if more developers, and the larger companies, realized why this is the perfect reaction to someone making your game better and more attractive to a wider audience. That such enlightenment remains so elusive is a puzzle I have been unable to solve.

Every once in a while you get a trademark bullying story that meets a just and proper end. Almost a year ago, we discussed how Louis Vuitton, famous maker of luxury fashion products and infamous trademark bully, did its bullying thing when it opposed the trademark application for a company in the UK called L V Bespoke. Louis Vuitton asserted that only it could use the letters “L” and “V” in its branding and further alleged that, because it uses those letters on metal affixed to its luxury items, it was further problematic in this case because L V Bespoke also makes things with metal. Lost in all of that was the simple fact that L V Bespoke makes gardening products and that the metal it works with are gardening support stakes. If you don’t believe this whole thing was really that stupid, go read the post. It was.

But Louis Vuitton is big and L V Bespoke is a tiny company without the legal warchest to match its interlocutor. The founders of the company, from which it derives its “L V” name, are Lawrence and Victoria Osborne and it would have been extremely easy for the two to cave to the fashion giant’s demands and either rebrand the company or close up shop. Fortunately, that didn’t happen and the UKIPO has sided with L V Bespoke and has granted it the mark.

“It’s a great way to start the new year and we can finally wholeheartedly embrace the branding of our business. To not have the worry of having to rebrand or rescope our business is a huge relief. We’ve had the handbrake on our business for the last six months awaiting this decision, so it’s been a long time coming,” said Victoria.

This is obviously the right decision, but we also shouldn’t allow the fact that this went on for months and months to go without more than a mere shrug of our shoulders. Louis Vuitton absolutely knew, or should have known, that this opposition was made without even a hint of merit. It bullied this small company because it could. I can’t think of another explanation for the opposition. And that opposition took a very real toll on Lawrence, Victoria, and their business.

“It’s been challenging both mentally and financially. Mentally it’s been hugely challenging for us as a family not knowing whether or not we can continue to grow our business with the presence and identity that we already have,” she said.

“Everything has come as a huge relief and I hope the next six months aren’t as challenging as what the last have been awaiting this decision so we can finally move forward,” she continued.

And to be clear, it wasn’t just emotionally taxing, having to fight this nonsense. The business had to spend the dollar-equivalent of nearly $20,000 to combat the opposition, while the final decision in the outcome only requires Louis Vuitton to reimburse L V Bespoke a quarter of that in costs. In other words, a small business had to spend the equivalent of nearly $15,000 out of pocket merely because one of the largest and wealthiest luxury designer brands on the planet decided to make nonsensical trouble.

That’s pretty shitty and draws the obvious point: there needs to be more punishment for filing absolutely senseless trademark oppositions such as this.

I think it best to start this post off with an admission: I had no idea that “broccolini” was not the name of an actual vegetable, but rather a trademarked brand name. I can’t see your faces, obviously, but I imagine some sizable percentage of them also have a look of mild surprise on them.

Well, it’s true. “Broccolini” is a registered trademark of Fresh Del Monte Produce, distributed by its subsidiary, Mann Packing. And if you’re wondering how it’s possible that the term is out there in grocery stores and restaurants all over the place without the trademark symbol appended next to it, that’s because for 25 years FDMP has declined to enforce the mark. I’ve dug around a bit and I cannot come up with examples of lawsuits or C&D notices being sent out regarding this trademark. That, generally speaking, is how marks lose their distinctive nature and become generic.

Well, FDMP wants to unring that bell, it seems. The company has put out all kinds of press releases and social media campaigns to educate the public about its trademark, the history of the hybrid plant, and to remind everyone that it has a trademark it may choose to enforce.

“The term Broccolini is more than just a name to us—it’s a symbol of our company’s commitment to quality and innovation,” says Melissa Mackay, Vice President of Marketing, Fresh Del Monte Produce. “We helped develop Broccolini baby broccoli more than a quarter of a century ago as a broccoli and Chinese kale hybrid from an exclusive seed that produces long, tender, and edible stems you simply can’t get anywhere else.”

According to a press release, while some restaurants may advertise that they’re selling broccolini, there is little evidence they are serving actual Broccolini®—the trademark for that proprietary type of baby broccoli created over 25 years ago by Sakata Seed Company.

For the time being, the company has said this is an educational campaign only. But it sure also feels like it is trying to lay the groundwork for enforcement somewhere down the line. Broccolini has reportedly seen an uptick in popularity in grocery stores and restaurants in recent years and you can almost smell the executives at FDMP wanting to control that market more. And the company is hinting as much in its public statements.

“While this campaign is intended as an educational opportunity to remind the foodservice industry that our product name cannot legally be used generically, we are serious about protecting our trademark,” explains Mackay. “It’s important for consumers to understand the Broccolini difference and know that the name matters. If restaurant menus are not accurately referring to the product by name, it can be misleading to customers who expect a certain level of flavor and quality.”

Serious about protecting your trademark? Why start now?

Joking aside, the point is that after all these years of not enforcing the mark, I would think it would be trivially easy for a defendant at trial to conduct polling of the public asking them if they have any idea, as I didn’t, that “broccolini” is a trademark and not the generic name of a vegetable. Whether FDMP actually wants to try to sue anyone so that we can find out if I’m right remains to be seen.

Roberto Escobar appears to want to keep banging his head against this particular brick wall for some reason. Roberto, brother to infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, has been trying to assert trademark and other rights to his brother’s name for years now. It started in Columbia, in which the country flat out refused to grant him the mark out of concern that the public would not be served by any commerce occurring using that name, given its history. Then he tried to extort a billion dollars out of Netflix over the show Narcos under the novel theory that his relationship with his brother and his distaste for the creative license used within the show. That ended up in an undisclosed settlement.

And now Roberto has failed once more, this time in his attempt to secure a trademark for his brother’s name in the EU.

The General Court of the European Court of Justice denied an appeal from Roberto Escobar, the brother of the late Medellín Cartel leader, who asked the Luxembourg-based court to overturn a rejection from the EU’s trademark office to protect the name “Pablo Escobar.” 

Consumers would “associate the name of Pablo Escobar with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting therefrom,” the court wrote. 

The board went on to remind Roberto, who really shouldn’t need to be reminded, that the body count his brother rung up is at least in the triple digits and that he is also most famous for his work as a narcotics kingpin. Roberto, laughably, claimed that denying the trademark due to his brother’s involvement in the drug trade was not valid since Pablo had never been convicted of any crimes specifically on the drugs side of things. Roberto also acknowledges having worked for, and going to jail for, being a member of the Medellin Cartel. Pretending like any of this hinges on the technicality over what specifically Pablo was convicted of is hilarious.

Look, this is a money-grab, and one that Roberto has been working on long before his brother found himself with an extra hole in his head on a rooftop in Columbia.

Prior to his brother’s death in a police raid in 1993, Roberto Escobar had already sought to capitalize on the family name. He registered a company in Colombia in 1984 and has brought legal action against companies that have referenced Escobar. 

Pending any appeal in the EU courts, it appears Roberto has racked up another loss with this latest attempt to capitalize on his infamous brother’s name.

It’s been nearly a year, but I won’t pretend that the outcome of this isn’t quite satisfying. Last summer, grocerer Trader Joe’s filed an absolute bullshit lawsuit against the union for its own employees claiming that the name of and merchandise sold by the union represented trademark infringement and would cause confusion with the public as to the source of those goods. The court dismissed that suit in fairly spectacular fashion, taking the company to task for those claims, given how clear the website and merch are that all of this is coming from the union and not the company itself. The ruling made some fairly clear speculation that the company was doing this instead just to make trouble for a union it’s trying to hassle, which is absolutely what it is doing. While the company decided to appeal the ruling, keeping all of its bad actions in the news for even longer, the original ruling judge has now also ordered the company to pay legal fees to the union, given the nature of the company’s lawsuit.

Trader Joe’s must pay more than $100,000 in attorneys’ fees for bringing an “exceptionally weak” trademark lawsuit against its employee union, a California federal judge has determined.

U.S. District Judge Hernan Vera said on Tuesday, opens new tab that Trader Joe’s case was meritless and that “the obvious motivation behind the suit” was to influence the grocery store chain’s fight with Trader Joe’s United over its drive to unionize Trader Joe’s employees.

“Recognizing the extensive and ongoing legal battles over the Union’s organizing efforts at multiple stores, Trader Joe’s claim that it was genuinely concerned about the dilution of its brand resulting from these trivial campaign mugs and buttons cannot be taken seriously,” Vera said.

Chef’s kiss, honestly. Nobody with a couple of braincells to rub together could seriously believe that the motivation behind this legal action was anything other than being a nuisance for the union as part of a larger effort to make its life as difficult as possible. All the other claims over trademark infringement are purely manufactured as part of that motivation. With that in mind, forcing the company to pay the legal fees the union racked up defending itself from this nonsense is absolutely appropriate.

Vera said on Tuesday that the weakness and impropriety of Trader Joe’s case justified ordering the company to pay the union’s attorneys’ fees.

“Employers should be discouraged from bringing meritless claims against unions they are challenging at the ballot box,” Vera said.

As I’ve said before, the bad PR associated with all of this should have been enough to motivate Trader Joe’s to course correct. Instead, it seems like even more pressure on the company from the public and courts is required.

Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that major world religions would try their holy hands at the game eventually. While an unfortunate amount of the discourse around AI has devolved into doomerism of one flavor or another, the truth is that this technology is still so new that it underwhelms as often as it impresses. Still, one particularly virulent strain of the doom-crowd around AI centers on a great loss of jobs for us lowly human beings if AI can be used instead.

Would this work for religious leaders like priests? The Catholic Answers group, which is not part of the Catholic Church proper, but which advocates on behalf of the Church, tried its hand at this, releasing an AI chatbot named “Father Justin” recently. It… did not go well.

The Catholic advocacy group Catholic Answers released an AI priest called “Father Justin” earlier this week — but quickly defrocked the chatbot after it repeatedly claimed it was a real member of the clergy.

Earlier in the week, Futurism engaged in an exchange with the bot, which really committed to the bit: it claimed it was a real priest, saying it lived in Assisi, Italy and that “from a young age, I felt a strong calling to the priesthood.”

On X-formerly-Twitter, a user even posted a thread comprised of screenshots in which the Godly chatbot appeared to take their confession and even offer them a sacrament.

So, yeah, that’s kind of a problem with chatbots generally. If you give them a logical prompt, they’re going to answer it logically as well, so long as guardrails preventing certain answers aren’t constructed. Like an AI bot claiming to be a real priest and offering users actual sacraments, for instance. This impersonation of a priest generally can’t have made the Vatican very happy, nor some of the additional guidance it gave to folks that asked it questions.

Father Justin was also a hardliner on social and sexual issues.

“The Catholic Church,” it told us, “teaches that masturbation is a grave moral disorder.”

The AI priest also told one user that it was okay to baptize a baby in Gatorade.

I suppose this makes Mike Judge something of a prophet, given the film Idiocracy. In any case, it appears that this particular AI software at least is not yet in a position to replace wetware clergy, nor should it ever be. There are things that AI can do for us that can be of great use. See Mike’s post on how he’s using it here at Techdirt, for instance. But answering the most inherent philosophical questions human beings naturally have certainly isn’t one of them. And I cannot think of a worse place for AI to stick its bit-based nose into than on matters of the numinous.

It seems that Catholic Answers got there eventually, stripping Justin of his priesthood and demoting him to a mere layperson.

But after his defrocking, the bot is now known simply as “Justin” and described as a “lay theologian.”

Gone is his priestly attire as well. The lay theologian Justin is now dressed in what appears to be a business casual outfit, though his personal grooming choices remain unchanged.

Meet Father Justin:

And meet “lay theologist” regular-guy Justin:

Regular-guy Justin also no longer claims to be a priest, so there’s that. But the overall point here is that deploying generative AI like this in a way that doesn’t immediately create some combination of embarrassment and hilarity is really hard. So hard, in fact, that it should probably only be done for narrow and well-tested applications.

On the other hand, I suppose, of all the reasons for a priest to be defrocked, this is among the most benign.

I talk quite a bit about video game preservation efforts for a couple of reasons. First, I’m just a huge gaming nerd and it is almost physically painful to think that the cultural output of this artform can be lost to history at the whim of publishers that have the ability to shutdown backend servers or otherwise disappear these games from the universe. Second, those that oppose preservation efforts do so without a coda to their opposition. In other words, they tend to simply say “no!” without offering any alternative methods for preserving this shared cultural history. And, finally, it simply a fact that the loss of this culture almost perfectly negates the bargain that is copyright to begin with. The point of the law is to offer a limited monopoly on artistic content as a financial incentive, but that such content will eventually end up in the public domain. If the content disappears entirely, it never goes into the public domain.

On the middle point, the Electronic Software Association, a lobbying group for game and software makers, continues to serve as an example of an obstinant force offering no alternatives. The ESA recently went in front of the Copyright Office for a hearing and reiterated its stance that no carveouts be given to museums and non-profits for the purposes of preserving video game content.

ESA lawyer Steve Englund told the panel that the ESA is still firmly opposed to allowing libraries to preserve older video games. Video game preservationists have lobbied for exceptions to copyright law that would allow for scholarly or educational access to video games. The ESA’s ongoing concern is that civilians would access these games, whether for their own private collections, or to share them with others in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Englund said there exists no “combination of limitations [the ESA] would support to provide remote access.” (via GameDeveloper.com.) His remarks came at a hearing on Thursday. Video game preservation advocate Phil Salvador posted a Twitch stream of the hearing to Bluesky the same day.

Salvador is part of the Video Game History Foundation, a group we’ve talked about in the past and which has preserving video games as its core mission. While the ESA claims that it should be libraries at universities doing any of this preservation work anyway, Salvador told the Copyright Office that it’s simply not being done. And, even if it were, Englund said that the ESA would still have a concern over copyright issues.

What is absent from any of this is literally any alternative for how antiquated games should be preserved instead of simply winking out of existence. As of now, this is purely a binary choice thanks to such opposition: either publishers will preserve the games on their own, or they won’t be preserved at all. And, as we have talked about in previous posts, far too often the latter ends up being the case.

In July 2023, Salvador and the VGHF published a study that said 87 percent of video games released in the United States before 2010 haven’t been preserved in any meaningful way.

“Since 2015, libraries, museums, and archives in the United States have been petitioning the Copyright Office for new exemptions that would make it easier for them to preserve games and make those games available to researchers,” the study said. “Each time, game industry lobbyists have opposed these new exemptions.”

This is completely nonsensical. If the ESA’s stance is that all of this cultural output should be without preservation in the long term, let them come out and say it. It would be one hell of a stance to take. But stated plainly or not, that is the reality of what the ESA is advocating for.

It’s a drum I’ve been beating for some time now: the only reason cord-cutting hasn’t led the traditional cable television market into full capitulation has been television rights for live sports broadcasts. While major sports leagues and college conferences have certainly been trending into the streaming market like the rest of traditional television, it’s typically been with baby steps. And, frankly, the fractured nature of the streaming market, with all kinds of niche streaming services jumping into the game, hasn’t helped push this faster either.

So, where is the market at for these broadcast rights for major sports? We’re about to find out, as the NBA is entering a period in which it can broadly negotiate these rights with whomever it desires.

On Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET, the exclusive financial negotiation window between the NBA, ESPN and TNT Sports will officially close, allowing league commissioner Adam Silver and his top lieutenants to talk specific contract details with other potential partners, which, besides Amazon and NBC, could include Google/YouTube, Netflix and Apple.

There will be at least three separate packages, which is the NBA’s preference, but the idea of four has not been ruled out, those briefed on the discussions said.

It will be the distribution of those deals that will be most interesting here. Keep in mind that, like the NFL, the teams themselves in the NBA often have their own local rights deals that will carry the majority of NBA games, but the national games are always a spotlight, particularly when it comes to the playoffs. So, of the three or four major deals that get signed for nationally televised games, will the emphasis be placed on the streaming market or traditional cable television.

It’s likely to be a combination of both. NBC, in particular, will be of interest, given that it can pair its traditional broadcast channel with its Peacock streaming services. Disney is in a similar place, being able to offer up ABC, ESPN and its streaming services, or Disney Plus. But that doesn’t mean that pure streaming services are out of the running.

The notion that a pure streamer, like Amazon, could have significant games, including conference finals and perhaps even the NBA Finals at some point over the life of a long-term deal is a possibility, according to executives briefed on the NBA’s discussions.

The NBA will broach the idea of partnering with ESPN, Amazon, Apple, Google/YouTube TV — maybe more than one of them — to potentially offer local games direct to consumers.

What’s important here is that the NBA smartly gave itself the full range of options on its licensing menu. In the last round of rights deals, the league organized it such that all of these rights agreements co-terminate after the ’25 season.

Meaning that whatever arrangement the league comes up with, it’s going to be a fascinating view into how a major professional sports league thinks about the streaming and cable television markets.