[H]ardNews 10th Edition

Sucky Game Fee:

The CEO of Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, Jason Hall, has come up with a way to hold game companies accountable for cranking our crappy movie-based games. The solution? Charge royalties on a sliding scale instead of a fixed fee. If you make a game that rocks, you get a low royalty fee. If you make another ass-tacular movie game, you get a high royalty fees. Jason Hall is a personal friend of mine, and many of you might not agree with him, but one thing we ALL agree on is the fact that movie-games generally suck and something should be done.

"The game industry has had its time to exploit movie studios all day long and to get away with producing inferior products," says Hall. "But, with Warner Brothers, no more. Those days are over. And we mean it. This isn't just lip service. Honestly, the bad games are over."

Arrrr Matey!

Well, the RIAA pioneered it, but the Department of Justice might soon have the power to go after software pirates much in the same way the RIAA have done against music downloaders. Blame P. Brent Buist for the news.

The so-called Pirate Act is raising alarms among copyright lawyers and lobbyists for peer-to-peer firms, who have been eyeing the recording industry's lawsuits against thousands of peer-to-peer users with trepidation. The Justice Department, they say, could be far more ambitious.