Games Journalism 2017: Gaming news in a post-truth world

This is true. The life of a tuber can be quite a good one, but they are held on by a string, and subject to brutal harassment from companies seeking to abuse the copyright system.

But, when it comes to fair use situation, I don’t think wargaming.net has any say over this whatsoever. Use of footage for the purpose of criticism falls under the terms of fair use, plain and simple. Youtube is a 3rd party site, they cannot blackmail someone with a copyright strike. They weren’t paying SirFoch, nor was the content he was showing off part of any NDA.

Additionally, I doubt they even had anything set up in writing. As, apparently, wargaming.net does not pay contributors at all, they just give them free stuff to review on their channels. I would bet that they really don’t have anything set up legally that would cover a copyright strike, as youtube’s policy is to assume guilt first, making the youtuber prove fair use (which happens basically 100% of the time).

Now, since this, wargaming.net’s head of the community has said that it is not their policy to pursue copyright strikes on youtube, and that the rep speaking with SirFoch was incorrect, and using the wrong terminology. The only way they would ever pursue a copyright strike would be someone showing content that is under an NDA (which is fair) but the content in question was not, and that should not have been threatened.

If we were dealing with parties at arms’ length, I’d completely agree. But fair use as a shield to protect one party to a contract from a claim of breach by the other may be an overextension of the doctrine, which has not been broadly construed as a rule. Certainly not as broadly as I’d like it to be, but then I don’t think Disney’s entitled to its own legislation preventing its early films from going public domain, either. So it seems clear that nobody with money or power is interested in my take.

I am interested in. your take, but have neither money nor power.

So you’re right on all counts ;)

Generally I find I fall pretty strongly on the side of the YouTuber in most situations. The general shittiness, and abuse of copyright systems by various corporate interests renders me to default against them in all but extraordinary circumstances.

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Re: Wargaming.net

[quote]Dear Commanders,

We have further reviewed the incident of last Friday involving SirFoch and his “Chrysler K GF rant” video, and know we could have handled the situation a lot better. We strongly support our players’, including our Community Contributors’, right to speak critically about us and our games. We acted too quickly and over the line when we threatened to have YouTube remove SirFoch’s video through a copyright infringement complaint and we are apologizing for that.

We’re committed to doing a better job on this front. We’re going to improve the way we communicate with our Community and our Community Contributors, and as part of that effort we will work with them on more detailed, specific guidelines to help ensure incidents like this don’t happen again.

Our official position is that Wargaming will not take copyright action against opinions based on our publicly released content.

Over the weekend we released a statement to some media outlets regarding the content of SirFoch’s video that inferred that SirFoch’s videos contained hate speech and homophobia. While we would obviously not want such content to be associated with any of our games – this video clearly did not. We apologize for this statement, and we don’t stand behind those claims.

We love our players and our contributors – and we appreciate their honesty and commitment – we are committed to using this incident to grow and improve.[/quote]

They forgot to mention that lessons were learnt. That’s an important part of a Meaningless Corporate Apology. How do I know that they absolutely won’t do this again if they don’t say that? (Usually the lesson that’s learn is “don’t get caught”)

Time to get the torches and pitchforks! Apparently, Eurogamer is now blocking Adblock.

[quote]
Hey, about Adblock! You’ve read 5 pages without ads on Eurogamer this week. Please disable your adblocker to continue. We appreciate that ads can be annoying, but they are the thing that keeps Eurogamer running. We are committed to keeping ads as unobtrusive as possible and adhering to the Better Ads standard - in exchange, please consider whitelisting us so that we can continue providing editorial at no cost to you.[/quote]

Of course, there are people losing their minds over this.

I can understand it for the likes of Eurogamer, though a) I’ve been to the Better Ads Standards website and I can’t tell you what the standards actually are, and b) to the extent I can infer what they are, they don’t seem to address the vetting of ads at all, merely the presentation.

Where it really gets my goat, though, is on papers like the FT, to which I subscribe at a fairly hefty cost. Your online ad revenue is a pittance compared to your subs revenue, but you’re going to to harangue me anyway for trying to protect my privacy and security?

I’m happy to whitelist web sites from my adblocker.

But while I don’t read Eurogamer, every other web site which does mention my adblocker is without fail the worst offender at having just awful ads which kill performance and render the entire site unreadable anyway.

I didn’t really read the Qt3 front page for ages because the ads would lag my entire browser session out until I closed it, but I felt too guilty to ad-block :(

New, ad-free front page is best front page, however!

Apparently Better Ads standard means full page animated ads (sides, top, back) as well as those insipid fake news articles (revcontent) complete with random and/or unpleasant pictures at the end.

Eurogamer was the first gaming news website I used to start significantly altering how content was displayed to make ads far more prominent (and to the detriment of the reading experience) back in 2004.

Not sure which web-site I was supposed to see, but this is how Eurogamer looks to me:

Obviously, this can be tweaked.

I like how connecting to Eurogamer needs cookies from Google, and Facebook, and whatever else.

Hmm, come to think of it, haven’t really visited that site in ages and do not think I’ll begin again now.

I’ve abandoned sites because of their auto running ad videos that pop-up when I whitelist them. The websites earned Adblocker… it didn’t just happen to them.

I can view Eurogamer fine with no ads using uBlock Origin, but I also have Scriptsafe running and scripting disabled. If I enable scripting for eurogamer.com, the site loads for a second and then displays a blank page. No message at all about blocking the adblocker, and I’m not going to allow scripting on third-party sites to try and find it.

God, yes. Autorun videos, especially ones hidden randomly at the bottom of pages, or that cycle every few minutes so even after you pause one, another starts soon anyhow, can all burn in hell. People who make them are internet cancer.

I use the same. On Eurogamer I temporarily allowed some scripts. After clicking on 3 random articles I got the ‘You have read three of 5 articles etc’ warning. But it was only a test, I don’t read them.

Very long article covering Halo.

[quote]
What follows across the three parts of our exclusive oral history are direct accounts from the people who made Halo, in its many and varied guises, since the 2001 debut of Combat Evolved.[/quote]

Hmm. So did they already blink and walk this back? Or is it not fully rolled out yet? I run 1Blocker on iOS and Eurogamer isn’t complaining about it for me yet.

If you don’t mind me asking, how do you get that cool, human, sortable display, instead of the cold silly default logger of Ublock?

It is “uMatrix” instead.

Most recent version of Chrome (beta channel) has something similar inbuilt from my understanding.