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Submission + - Writer needs to pay Marvel $17000 for claiming authorship of Ghost Rider (blogspot.com.au) 1

asliarun writes: Gary Friedrich, the creator of Ghost Rider is being ordered to pay Marvel $17000 by the courts. It seems that he continued to claim to be the author and creator of Ghost Rider even after he signed over the rights of the character to Marvel. Profiting from this claim by merely attending conventions and seminars is now considered illegal in the eyes of the law, and he needs to pay back Marvel for all his ill-gotten gains, which amounts to the massive sum of seventeen thousand dollars. Gary also happens to be 68 year old and more or less broke. Shareholders and senior staff of Marvel were seen rejoicing on hearing this news, and the significant boost this money will provide to their annual profits and bonuses.

Comment Re:Evidence that patents need a limited time frame (Score 2) 323

It's related to design, not functionality. It's not as if Apple was trying to prevent anyone from making a smartphone, just prevent someone from creating a smartphone that (to most consumers) looked identical to an iPhone. They never said that they objected to Samsung making a phone that leveraged location services, push notifications, an accelerometer, and a touch screen.

Comment Re:Evidence that patents need a limited time frame (Score 0) 323

Apple suing Samsung was related to Samsung creating a phone that looked almost identical to the iPhone; it wasn't to prevent Samsung from using any particular technology. Samsung was the one that started trying to use their own patents to prevent Apple from using specific technology.

Comment Re:Evidence that patents need a limited time frame (Score 3, Funny) 323

When has Apple attempted to stop someone from using something covered under one of their patents without the other party first bringing litigation against Apple? I'm not saying that there's no chance it happened, I just do not recall a case in which Apple has attacked another company unprovoked.

Comment Commercial -vs- Indie (Score 1) 287

I think that a lot of the complaints mentioned in the post apply more to large commercial games than to Indie efforts. I love some of the large commercial games like Red Dead Redemption, but felt that I expected more polish out of such a major effort, while I've played some indie games that felt nearly perfect (Braid, Limbo). Perhaps the issue is that a lot of the larger commercial games are repeats of an old concept, while many of the indies feel fresh. When you've already experience a mechanic ten times over you become free to pay attention to some of the minutia.

Comment Re:The art of deception (Score 5, Insightful) 77

I really got sucked into this one. I saw Mitnick on the Colbert Report, downloaded the sample to my iPad, quickly reached the end of the sample, purchased the full copy, then read until the book was finished. I heard the other side of the story while I was really into computer security, this made getting Mitnick's personal account of events something that really interested me. Reading through this book brought back a lot of memories and proved to be much more enjoyable than I had initially anticipated.

Comment Re:o hai, it's just me, Big Brother (Score 4, Interesting) 391

I'd be shocked if that were the case. I think that this is really just a way for Apple to reduce storage costs. They've got this great new data center, but they don't want to fill it up with 500 copies of every song in their music library, encoded in all different formats and bitrates.

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