An anonymous reader shares a report: When will AI movies start showing up in theaters nationwide? It was supposed to be next month. But when word leaked online that an AI short film contest winner was going to start screening before feature presentations in AMC Theatres, the cinema chain decided not to run the content.

The issue began earlier this week with the inaugural Frame Forward AI Animated Film Festival announcing Igor Alferov's short film Thanksgiving Day had won the contest. The prize package for included Thanksgiving Day getting a national two-week run in theaters nationwide. When word of this began hitting social media, however, some were dismayed by the prospect of exhibitors embracing AI content, with many singling out AMC Theatres for criticism.

Except the short is not actually programmed by exhibitors, exactly, but by Screenvision Media -- a third-party company which manages the 20-minute, advertising-driven pre-show before a theater's lights go down. Screenvision -- which co-organized the festival along with Modern Uprising Studios -- provides content to multiple theatrical chains, not just AMC. After The Hollywood Reporter reached out to AMC about the brewing controversy, the company issued this statement to THR on Thursday: "This content is an initiative from Screenvision Media, which manages pre-show advertising for several movie theatre chains in the United States and runs in fewer than 30 percent of AMC's U.S. locations. AMC was not involved in the creation of the content or the initiative and has informed Screenvision that AMC locations will not participate."

Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage -- a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget.

Iron Lung, a 127-minute sci-fi adaptation of a video game Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and edited himself, opened to $18.3 million in its first weekend and has since doubled that figure worldwide in just two weeks, nearly matching the $19.1 million debut of Send Help, a $40 million thriller from Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Fischbach declined deals from traditional distributors and instead spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging fans to reserve tickets online; when prospective viewers found the film wasn't screening in their city, they called local cinemas to request it, eventually landing Iron Lung on more than 3,000 screens across North America -- all without a single paid media campaign.

In India, Bollywood stars are asking judges to protect their voice and persona in the era of AI. From a report: One famous couple's biggest target is Google's YouTube. Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, known for her iconic Cannes Film Festival red carpet appearances, have asked a judge to remove and prohibit creation of AI videos infringing their intellectual property rights. But in a more far-reaching request, they also want Google ordered to have safeguards to ensure such YouTube videos uploaded anyway do not train other AI platforms, legal papers reviewed by Reuters show.

A handful of Bollywood celebrities have begun asserting their "personality rights" in Indian courts over the last few years, as the country has no explicit protection for those like in many U.S. states. But the Bachchans' lawsuits are the most high-profile to date about the interplay of personality rights and the risk that misleading or deepfake YouTube videos could train other AI models. The actors argue that YouTube's content and third-party training policy is concerning as it lets users consent to sharing of a video they created to train rival AI models, risking further proliferation of misleading content online, according to near-identical filings from Abhishek and Aishwarya dated September 6, which are not public.

Mickey Mouse's first movie Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in 2024.

Now one of America's largest personal injury firms is suing Disney, reports the Associated Press, "in an effort to get a ruling that would allow it to use Steamboat Willie in advertisements..." [The law firm said] it had reached out to Disney to make sure the entertainment company wouldn't sue them if they used images from the animated film for their TV and online ads. Disney's lawyers responded by saying they didn't offer legal advice to third parties, according to the lawsuit. Morgan & Morgan said it was filing the lawsuit to get a decision because it otherwise feared being sued by Disney for trademark infringement if it used Steamboat Willie.
"Without waiver of any of its rights, Disney will not provide such advice in response to your letter," Disney's attorneys wrote in their letter (adding "Very truly yours..."). A local newscast showed a glimpse of the letter, along with a few seconds of the ad (which ends with Minnie Mouse pulling out a cellphone to call for a lawyer...)

Attorney John Morgan tells the newscast that Disney's legal team "is playing cute, and so we're just trying to get a yes or no answer.. They wrote us back a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that made no sense, didn't answer the question. We tried it again, they didn't answer the question..." (The newscast adds that the case isn't expected to go to court for at least a year.)

Newfoundland and Labrador's 10-year Education Accord report (PDF) intended to guide school reform has been found to contain at least 15 fabricated citations, including references to non-existent films and journals. Academics suggest the fake sources may have been generated by AI. "There are sources in this report that I cannot find in the MUN Library, in the other libraries I subscribe to, in Google searches. Whether that's AI, I don't know, but fabricating sources is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence," said Aaron Tucker, an assistant professor at Memorial whose current research focuses on the history of AI in Canada. "The fabrication of sources at least begs the question: did this come from generative AI?" CBC News reports: In one case, the report references a 2008 movie from the National Film Board called Schoolyard Games. The film doesn't exist, according to a spokesperson for the board. But the exact citation used in the report can be found in a University of Victoria style guide -- a document that clearly lists fake references designed as templates for researchers writing a bibliography. "Many citations in this guide are fictitious," reads the first page of the document.

"Errors happen. Made-up citations are a totally different thing where you essentially demolish the trustworthiness of the material," said Josh Lepawsky, the former president of the Memorial University Faculty Association who resigned from the report's advisory board last January, citing a "deeply flawed process" leading to "top-down" recommendations. The 418-page Education Accord NL report took 18 months to complete and was unveiled Aug. 28 by its co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial's Faculty of Education. The pair released the report alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis. "We are investigating and checking references, so I cannot respond to this at the moment," wrote Goodnough in an email declining an interview Thursday. In a statement, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development said it was aware of a "small number of potential errors in citations" in the report. "We understand that these issues are being addressed, and that the online report will be updated in the coming days to rectify any errors."

A group led by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther has launched a new protocol designed to standardize and scale licensing of online content for AI training. Backed by publishers like Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, and Medium, Real Simple Licensing (RSL) combines machine-readable terms in robots.txt with a collective rights organization, aiming to do for AI training data what ASCAP did for music royalties. However, it remains to be seen whether AI labs will agree to adopt it. TechCrunch reports: According to RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard, the goal was to create a training-data licensing system that could scale across the internet. "We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet," Walther told TechCrunch. "That's really what RSL solves."

For years, groups like the Dataset Providers Alliance have been pushing for clearer collection practices, but RSL is the first attempt at a technical and legal infrastructure that could make it work in practice. On the technical side, the RSL Protocol lays out specific licensing terms a publisher can set for their content, whether that means AI companies need a custom license or to adopt Creative Commons provisions. Participating websites will include the terms as part of their "robots.txt" file in a prearranged format, making it straightforward to identify which data falls under which terms.

On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once. A host of web publishers have already joined the collective, including Yahoo, Reddit, Medium, O'Reilly Media, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable and Cnet), Internet Brands (owner of WebMD), People Inc., and The Daily Beast. Others, like Fastly, Quora, and Adweek, are supporting the standard without joining the collective.

Notably, the RSL Collective includes some publishers that already have licensing deals -- most notably Reddit, which receives an estimated $60 million a year from Google for use of its training data. There's nothing stopping companies from cutting their own deals within the RSL system, just as Taylor Swift can set special terms for licensing while still collecting royalties through ASCAP. But for publishers too small to draw their own deals, RSL's collective terms are likely to be the only option.

PC Gamer reports: The Diablo team is the next in line to unionize at Blizzard. Over 450 developers across multiple disciplines have voted to form a union under the Communications Workers of America (CWA), and they're now the fourth major Blizzard team to do so... A wave of unions have formed at Blizzard in the last year, including the World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Story and Franchise Development teams. Elsewhere at Microsoft, Bethesda, ZeniMax Online Studios and ZeniMax QA testers have also unionized...

The CWA says over 3,500 Microsoft workers have now organized to fight for fair compensation, job security, and improved working conditions.
CWA is America's largest communications and media labor union, and in a statement, local 9510 president Jason Justice called the successful vote "part of a much larger story about turning the tide in an industry that has long overlooked its labor. Entertainment workers across film, television, music, and now video games are standing together to have a seat at the table. The strength of our movement comes from that solidarity."

And CWA local 6215 president Ron Swaggerty said "Each new organizing effort adds momentum to the nationwide movement for video game worker power."

"What began as a trickle has turned into an avalanche," writes the gaming news site Aftermath, calling the latest vote "a direct result of the union neutrality deal Microsoft struck with CWA in 2022 when it was facing regulatory scrutiny over its $68.7 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard." We've come a long way since small units at Raven and Blizzard Albany fended off Activision Blizzard's pre-acquisition attempts at union busting in 2022 and 2023, and not a moment too soon: Microsoft's penchant for mass layoffs has cut some teams to the bone and left others warily counting down the days until their heads land on the chopping block. This new union, workers hope, will act as a bulwark...

[B]ased on preliminary conversations with prospective members, they can already hazard a few guesses as to what they'll be arm-wrestling management over at the bargaining table: pay equity, AI, crediting, and remote work.

A 25-year-old from Santa Clarita has pleaded guilty to hacking a Disney employee's computer using malware disguised as an AI art tool, stealing over 1 terabyte of confidential Disney data and threatening to leak it under the guise of a fake Russian hacktivist group. Variety reports: Santa Clarita resident Ryan Mitchell Kramer, 25, pleaded guilty to two felony charges, including one count of accessing a computer and obtaining information and one count of threatening to damage a protected computer. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison. According to the plea agreement, in early 2024 Kramer posted a computer program on various online platforms that appeared to be used to create AI-generated art, when it really contained a malicious file to gain access to victims' computers.

Between April and May 2024, a Disney employee downloaded the program, and Kramer gained access to the victim's personal and work accounts, including a non-public Disney Slack channel. Kramer dowloaded approximately 1.1 terabytes of confidential data from thousands of Disney Slack channels. In July, Kramer contacted the victim by pretending to be a member of a fake Russian hacktivist group called "Nullbulge" and threatened to leak their personal information and Disney Slack data. On July 12, Kramer publicly released the data, including the victim's bank, medical, and personal information on multiple online platforms.

It was already the best-selling videogame of all time, notes the Hollywood Reporter. And A Minecraft Movie just had the biggest opening ever for a video game movie adaptation. WIth a production budget of $150 million, it earned in $157 million in just its first weekend in the U.S., with a worldwide total of $301 million.

A Warner Bros. executive called the movie "lightning in a bottle," while the head of co-producer Legendary Pictures acknowledged the game is a global phenomon, according to the article. (About the movie's performance, the executive "said the opening is a both a reflection of the mandate to celebrate the world of Minecraft in a joyful way, and the singular experience that only theatrical can offer."

But an unfinished version leaked online before the movie was even released, reports Variety Screenshots and footage from the fantasy adventure were being shared widely on social media platforms this week, and were also available on file sharing sites. The images and scenes have uncompleted visual effects. Most of the footage was quickly taken down by the rights holders. Although pirated footage is a common problem for major film releases, it's rare to have a working print leak online in this way, raising questions about how such an early version of the movie was accessed, stolen and then shared.

To celebrate 2025's newest arrivals in the public domain, the Internet Archive held a special in-person event at their San Francisco headquarters, as well as a virtual celebration online. (It opens with an absolutely gorgeous rendition of "Happy Days are Hear Again" played on a musical saw.)

And somewhere in the festivities they announced the winners of this year's annual "Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest." These remarkable films not only reimagined and transformed public domain works but also demonstrated the boundless potential of remixing creative works to create something new... Explore all 140+ submissions at the 2025 Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest collection at the Internet Archive...

"The jury was deeply impressed by Queline Meadows's inspired mix of movies, images, music and text woven into a subtle and emotionally affecting video expressing a strong sense of nostalgia and the irretrievable passage of time," said film archivist Rick Prelinger... Filmmaker Samantha Close expresses both the breadth of 1929's production and the eternal bounty of the public domain, using images from 1929's films and public domain images from elsewhere and elsewhen.
One honorable mention entry was described as "an audacious and yes, dopey exploration of the essential greatness of Internet Archive and the dread near-infinity of copyright."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites. Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill. [...]

Lofgren's bill (PDF) would impose site-blocking requirements on broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million. The bill has exemptions for VPN services and "similar services that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers"; DNS providers that offer service "exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols"; and operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities. Lofgren released a summary of the bill explaining how copyright owners can obtain blocking orders. "A copyright owner or exclusive licensee may file a petition in US District Court to obtain a preliminary order against a foreign website or online service engaging in copyright infringement," the summary said.

For non-live content, the petition must show that "transmission of a work through a foreign website likely infringes exclusive rights under Section 106 [of US law] and is causing irreparable harm." For live events, a petition must show that "an imminent or ongoing unauthorized transmission of a live event is likely to infringe, and will cause irreparable harm." The proposed law says that after a preliminary order is issued, copyright owners would be able to obtain orders directing service providers "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order." Judges would not be permitted to "prescribe any specific technical measures" for blocking and may not require any action that would prevent Internet users from using virtual private networks.Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge described the bill as a "censorious site-blocking" measure "that turns broadband providers into copyright police at Americans' expense."

"Rather than attacking the problem at its source -- bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court -- Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry has decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship," Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. "Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites accused of copyright infringement. More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers results in global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on one individual's filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we've seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries."

The Los Angeles Times calls it "a guns-blazingly funny documentary about two out-of-work British actors who spent a chunk of their COVID-19 lockdown staging Shakespeare's masterpiece on the mean streets of Grand Theft Auto V."

Grand Theft Hamlet won SXSW's Jury Award for best documentary, and has now opened in U.S. theatres this weekend (and begun streaming on Mubi), after opening in the U.K. and Ireland. But nearly the entire film is set in Grand Theft Auto's crime-infested version of Los Angeles, the Times reports, "where even the good guys have weapons and a nihilistic streak — the vengeful Prince of Denmark fits right in." Yet when Sam Crane, a.k.a. @Hamlet_thedane, launches into one of the Bard's monologues, he's often murdered by a fellow player within minutes. Everyone's a critic.

Crane co-directed the movie with his wife, Pinny Grylls, a first-time gamer who functions as the film's camera of sorts. What her character sees, where she chooses to stand and look, makes up much of the film, although the editing team does phenomenal work splicing in other characters' points of view. (We're never outside of the game until the last 30 seconds; only then do we see anyone's real face....) The Bard's story is only half the point. Really, this is a classic let's-put-on-a-pixilated-show tale about the need to create beauty in the world — even this violent world — especially when stage productions in England have shuttered, forcing Crane, a husband and father, and Mark Oosterveen, single and lonely, to kill time speeding around the digital desert...

To our surprise (and theirs), the play's tussles with depression and anguish and inertia become increasingly resonant as the production and the pandemic limps toward their conclusions. When Crane and Oosterveen's "Grand Theft Auto" avatars hop into a van with an anonymous gamer and ask this online stranger for his thoughts on Hamlet's suicidal soliloquy, the man, a real-life delivery driver stuck at home with a broken leg, admits, "I don't think I'm in the right place to be replying to this right now...."
In 2014 Hamlet was also staged in Guild Wars 2, the article points out. "This is, however, the first attempt I'm aware of that attempts to do the whole thing live in one go, no matter if one of the virtual actors falls to their doom from a blimp.

"As Grylls says, 'You can't stop production just because somebody dies.'"

Today 34-year-old chess champion Magnus Carlsen married 26-year-old Ella Victoria Malone, "in a ceremony packed with guests on a sunny winter day in Oslo," reports Chess.com. According to Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet, a film crew from Netflix was also present. The streaming giant is shooting a chess-related TV show rumored to air in 2025... Ella Victoria is now expected to have a more central role in her husband's career. According to VG, she played a crucial role in securing Magnus a deal with fashion brand G-Star Raw...

Their wedding was surely a fairy tale, but the Carlsens aren't heading for their honeymoon just yet. Magnus is set to make his debut for St. Pauli in the German Bundesliga on January 10, when he'll face Dusseldorf led by none other than GM Gukesh Dommaraju.
The article adds that "For Carlsen, this caps off a whirlwind week that began in New York, highlighted by his eighth World Blitz Championship title," a victory that they say was "controversially" shared with Russian grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi. CNN reports: [Carlsen] had taken a 2-0 lead in the four-game contest before Nepomniachtchi launched a stunning comeback to level the scores, sending the match to a sudden death tie-break. The pair then drew the next three games, and it was later determined that they would share the title after the proposal was accepted by Arkady Dvorkovich, the president of chess governing body FIDE. "I thought, at that point, we had already played for a very long time and I was, first of all, very happy to end it, and I thought, at that point, it would have been very, very cruel on both of us if one gets first and the other gets second," Carlsen later told reporters....

[T]he decision to share the Blitz title with long-time rival Nepomniachtchi has sparked outcry from some of the world's top players — the first time in history that a world championship title has been shared. "This is a situation where I cannot stand with what Magnus has done," prominent player Hikaru Nakamura said on his YouTube channel. "I do not think that there is any precedent for this, when you put out rules about the game itself and then suddenly you decide, 'It's okay, we're going to go home' ... It's unconscionable to me...."

"FIDE goes from forfeiting Carlsen (over the jeans debacle) to creating an entirely new rule," Hans Niemann, whom Carlsen had defeated in the quarterfinals, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "Seems like the the regulatory body of chess has no intention of being unbiased. They seem to only care about what one player thinks...." Former world champion Garry Kasparov made a pointed reference to the jeans controversy, writing on X: "I thought the first FIDE tiebreak was pants."
Magnus apparently tells his opponent "If they like refuse, we can just play short draws until they give up," according to a behind-the-scenes video clip posted to X.com. The CEO of FIDE, Emil Sutovsky, re-posted it on X.com, complaining that FIDE president Dvorkovich's decision to accept the players' proposed draw was made "under the spur of a moment, and of course, the video appeared much later. I do think it is VERY BAD though..."

FIDE later told CNN that "This situation has already prompted valuable discussions within FIDE management to improve our regulations." (And their article adds that some — including grandmaster Ivan Sokolov — suggested ties be settled with a new chess format known as Armageddon.) "In Armageddon, White has more time but a draw on the board counts as a win for Black," explains the Guardian — adding that back in 1983, "Fide determined the winner of a Candidates match by a roulette wheel."

The Guardian adds that Russian-born FIDE president Arkady Dvorkovich "probably felt he had little choice but to rubber stamp the agreement by the players." He would have been pilloried in Moscow as preventing a Russian world champion had he ruled otherwise, and a negative could also have provoked a series of the notorious Berlin draws, the standard method for a quick mutually agreed half point. However, that course of action would have brought the players into disrepute, and it is more likely that an inspired game or a blunder would have settled the final. The audience on Wall Street applauded the decision, but the considerable online reaction from professional players and fans has been mostly critical.

It was the first ever shared over-the-board individual world title in chess history.

Tumblr is introducing a new Community feature similar to subreddits: in-app groups organized by topic or interest. "Topics include things like film photography, marine biology, LGBTQ, and video games, and each topic has its own landing page where posts shared with the community populate," reports The Verge. From the report: Many of the features mirror Reddit, like a count of how many members are online, moderators, and community guidelines. Posts shared to communities also get a new comments section that's only visible within the group. Communities have the option to be public or private. [...] Communities is available on the web, iOS, and Android.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since its introduction in the 1970s, Dungeons & Dragons has become one of the most influential tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) in popular culture, featuring heavily in Stranger Things, for example, and spawning a blockbuster movie released last year. Over the last decade or so, researchers have turned their focus more heavily to the ways in which D&D and other TRPGs can help people with autism form healthy social connections, in part because the gaming environment offers clear rules around social interactions. According to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Autism, D&D helped boost players' confidence with autism, giving them a strong sense of kinship or belonging, among other benefits.

"There are many myths and misconceptions about autism, with some of the biggest suggesting that those with it aren't socially motivated, or don't have any imagination," said co-author Gray Atherton, a psychologist at the University of Plymouth. "Dungeons & Dragons goes against all that, centering around working together in a team, all of which takes place in a completely imaginary environment. Those taking part in our study saw the game as a breath of fresh air, a chance to take on a different persona and share experiences outside of an often challenging reality. That sense of escapism made them feel incredibly comfortable, and many of them said they were now trying to apply aspects of it in their daily lives." [...] For this latest study. Atherton et al. wanted to specifically investigate how autistic players experience D&D when playing in groups with other autistic players. It's essentially a case study with a small sample size -- just eight participants -- and qualitative in nature, since the post-play analysis focused on semistructured interviews with each player after the conclusion of the online campaign, the better to highlight their individual voices.

The players were recruited through social media advertisements within the D&D, Reddit and Discord online communities; all had received an autism diagnosis by a medical professional. They were split into two groups of four players, with one of the researchers (who's been playing D&D for years) acting as the dungeon master. The online sessions featured in the study was the Waterdeep: Dragonheist campaign. The campaign ran for six weeks, with sessions lasting between two and four hours (including breaks). Participants spoke repeatedly about the positive benefits they received from playing D&D, providing a friendly environment that helped them relax about social pressures. "When you're interacting with people over D&D, you're more likely to understand what's going on," one participant said in their study interview. "That's because the method you'll use to interact is written out. You can see what you're meant to do. There's an actual sort of reference sheet for some social interactions." That, in turn, helped foster a sense of belonging and kinship with their fellow players.

Participants also reported feeling emotionally invested and close to their characters, with some preferring to separate themselves from their character in order to explore other aspects of their personality or even an entirely new persona, thus broadening their perspectives. "I can make a character quite different from how I interact with people in real-life interactions," one participant said. "It helps you put yourself in the other person's perspective because you are technically entering a persona that is your character. You can then try to see how it feels to be in that interaction or in that scenario through another lens." And some participants said they were able to "rewrite" their own personal stories outside the game by adopting some of their characters' traits -- a psychological phenomenon known as "bleed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jazmin Jones knowswhat she did. "If you're online, there's this idea of trolling," Jones, the director behindSeeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. "For this project, some things we're taking incredibly seriously ... and other things we're trolling. We're trolling this idea of a detective because we're also, like,ACAB." Her trolling, though, was for a good reason. Jones and fellow filmmaker Olivia Mckayla Ross did it in hopes of finding the woman behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The popular teaching tool was released in 1987 by The Software Toolworks, a video game and software company based in California that produced educational chess, reading, and math games. Mavis, essentially the "mascot" of the game, is a Black woman donned in professional clothes and a slicked-back bun. Though Mavis Beacon was not an actual person, Jones and Ross say that she is one of the first examples of Black representation they witnessed in tech. Seeking Mavis Beacon, which opened in New York City on August 30 and is rolling out to other cities in September, is their attempt to uncover the story behind the face, which appeared on the tool's packaging and later as part of its interface.

The film shows the duo setting up a detective room, conversing over FaceTime, running up to people on the street, and even tracking down a relative connected to the ever-elusive Mavis. But the journey of their search turned up a different question they didn't initially expect: What are the impacts of sexism, racism, privacy, and exploitation in a world where you can present yourself any way you want to? Using shots from computer screens, deep dives through archival footage, and sit-down interviews, the noir-style documentary reveals that Mavis Beacon is actually Renee L'Esperance, a Black model from Haiti who was paid $500 for her likeness with no royalties, despite the program selling millions of copies. [...]

In a world where anyone can create images of folks of any race, gender, or sexual orientation without having to fully compensate the real people who inspired them, Jones and Ross are working to preserve not only the data behind Mavis Beacon but also the humanity behind the software. On the panel, hosted by Black Girls in Media, Ross stated that the film's social media has a form where users of Mavis Beacon can share what the game has meant to them, for archival purposes. "On some level, Olivia and I are trolling ideas of worlds that we never felt safe in or protected by," Jones said during the panel. "And in other ways, we are honoring this legacy of cyber feminism, historians, and care workers that we are very seriously indebted to." You can watch the trailer for "Seeking Mavis Beacon" on YouTube.

A new TV series is capturing the dramatic saga of the The Pirate Bay, the notorious file-sharing website that openly challenged the entertainment industry in the early 2000s. A just-launched teaser is available on YouTube. TorrentFreak reports: A few years ago, news broke that The Pirate Bay story was being turned into a TV series. Written by Piotr Marciniak and directed by Jens Sjogren, who also made the "I am Zlatan" documentary, production was in the hands of B-Reel Films, working for the Swedish broadcaster SVT. American distribution company Dynamic Television scooped up worldwide rights. As far as we know, international deals have not yet been announced. The Swedish premiere on November 8 is coming closer, however, and a few days ago SVT released an official teaser.

The founders of The Pirate Bay -- Anakata, Brokep and Tiamo -- are played by Arvid Swedrup, Simon Greger Carlsson and Willjam Lempling. The teaser doesn't give away much, but it's interesting that one of The Pirate Bay's infamous responses to legal threats features prominently. The teaser quotes from Anakata's response to a letter from DreamWorks, written twenty years ago. The movie company sent a DMCA takedown notice requesting the removal of a torrent for the film Shrek 2, but the reply was not what they had hoped for. "As you may or may not be aware, Sweden is not a state in the United States of America. Sweden is a country in northern Europe. Unless you figured it out by now, US law does not apply here," Anakata wrote. "It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ........ morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons."

The response was public information and made it into the series. Whether there will be any new revelations has yet to be seen, however, as none of the site's founders were actively involved in production. Instead, the producers used interviews with other people involved, plus the vast amount of public information available on the Internet. That includes the infamous responses to legal threats. Time will tell how the producers and director have decided to tell this story. Production took place in Stockholm, Sweden, but also ventured to other countries, including Chile and Thailand, where Fredrik Neij was arrested and paraded in front of the press in 2014.

Indian influencers It's the largest country on earth — home to 1.4 billion people. But "The Indian government has plans to classify social media creators as 'digital news broadcasters,'" according to the nonprofit site RestofWorld.org.

While there's "no clarity" on the government's next move, the proposed legislation would require social media creators "to register with the government, set up a content evaluation committee that checks all content before it is published, and appoint complaint handlers — all at their own expense. Any failures in compliance could lead to criminal charges, including jail term." On July 26, the Hindustan Times reported that the government plans to tweak the proposed Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, which aims to combine all regulations for broadcasters under one law. As per a new version of the bill, which has been reviewed by Rest of World, the government defines "digital news broadcaster" as "any person who broadcasts news and current affairs programs through an online paper, news portal, website, social media intermediary, or other similar medium as part of a systematic business, professional or commercial activity."

Creators and digital rights activists believe the potential legislation will tighten the government's grip over online content and threaten the last bastion of press freedom for independent journalists in the country. Over 785 Indian creators have sent a letter to the government seeking more transparency in the process of drafting the bill. Creators have also stormed social media with hashtags like #KillTheBill, and made videos to educate their followers about the proposal.
One YouTube creator told the site that if the government requires them to appoint a "grievance redressal officer," they might simply film themselves, responding to grievances — to "make content out of it".

As Comic-Con hits San Diego, "part of the big news in 2024 is that the con won't have a corresponding virtual or online event this year," according to Polygon, "for the first time since 2019."

But there's still some big scifi media news, according to CNET's Comic-Con coverage: Disney revealed a new Doctor Who addition to the franchise that will jump back to the 1970s with the Sea Devils, an ancient group of beings who arise from the sea. Made in partnership with the BBC, the series... will air on Disney Plus, where fans can currently stream season 14 of Doctor Who starring Ncuti Gatwa.
And there's also an upcoming Doctor Who Christmas special.

Meanwhile, Saturday night, USA Today ran a special article with late-breaking announcements about Marvel's Cinematic Universe: Marvel has already won Comic-Con, with a raucous screening of "Deadpool & Wolverine" followed by a high-tech drone show, and the box office, with the new movie on track to have one of the best openings of all time... Robert Downey Jr. returns to the MCU as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday. Kevin Feige says the Fantastic Four will be in the next two Avengers movies... And here comes the Fantastic Four [movie] a year from now. It starts filming Tuesday in the UK...
The article says Marvel's Fantastic Four presentation included "a Fantasti-Car that hovers across the stage — and that castmembers also appeared from the upcoming Thunderbolts* movie.

More geeky news:

• Amazon Prime showed a new four-minute trailer with clips from season two of its J.R.R. Tolkein prequel, "The Rings of Power". (And there was also a three-minute blooper reel for Season 4 of Prime's superhero-themed series, "The Boys".)

• Paramount+ showed a trailer for the Star Trek universe's first streaming movie, Section 31. There was also a trailer for season 5 of the animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks — plus a particularly strange clip from the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

• Keanu Reeves accepted the Inkpot award for his contribution to the world of film and comics — partly because since 2021 Reeves has been co-authoring a Kickstarter-funded comic book called BRZRKR. (Netflix plans to adapt it into a movie.)

• Next February will see the release of Captain America: Brave New World, in which the Incredible Hulk may get some competition from Harrison Ford, who's been cast as the Red Hulk.

But things got a little too real Friday when a fire at a nearby steakhouse forced the evacuation of the immersive "Penguin Lounge" — which was promoting Max's new prequel series to 2022's movie The Batman.