Or perhaps, and this is just a suggestion, the OP was making an oblique reference to PAX. More specifically for Penny Arcade and one of its central founders of Jerry "Tycho" Holkins. Hence the clever substitution of "Tychoid" instead of "Typhoid".

My supervisor had that exact issue with their iPhone and Apple. They had taken the old 3G iPhone their daughter had and taken it to AT&T to get it switched over and activated. The AT&T tech realized that they had iTunes at home setup already and didn't need the full treatment so he yanked the cable out mid-sync without thinking and corrupted the phone's settings (Note: at the time they didn't realize that was the problem). Phone that was perfectly fine is hosed now but no worries, they thought, since they had AppleCare's extended warranty on it. My boss takes it to the Apple Store. Their tech stuck the magnifier near the sensor said "op, it's gotten wet so that's why it doesn't work and that's not covered under AppleCare" and sent them away.

Boss is furious and not caring anymore they hand it to our sysadmin who performs a simple restore OS (5 minutes, tops) and the phone is in perfect working order again. He pointed out that humidity can trip those moisture sensors since the air is in fact moist (our humidity hovers around 100% the entire summer) so that sensor is likely tripped on every phone in the area. Not sure that's true, but wouldn't it be handy for the companies to have such an easy way to deny repairs they would have to do otherwise?

Why would that be suspicious? Shock value and immediacy are well-known and often-used marketing ploys that would have a perfect application there while the loss is fresh in people's mind and the controversy would keep people buzzing about "the film that X was killed for" even if it was, in fact, completely baseless. Again, I'm noted for my lack of faith in humanity, so I might be overly cynical...

Heck, Uwe Boll tried to promote a movie via parody of 9/11, so I feel safe in saying there's no low a marketing agency won't stoop to if they think it will grab people's attention. I can even see completely innocent groups attempting tie-ins that even go so far as to try and cast doubt on their own innocence for the sake of buzz. Remember, this is a story about a company saying a movie series that likely had over a billion dollars in sales (tickets, DVDs, licensed products) made no money and is saying it with a straight face; conventional logic has no place here.

Murder is conveniently illegal, but that's never in the history of crime stopped those who profit from it. Al Capone ran an organized crime outfit likely responsible for many murders that he ordered to expand his business. He was never arrested nor tried for murder, even though it was an open secret he was behind many of them. Instead, he went to jail for tax evasion. So yeah, laws against murder won't accomplish much since they're rather irrelevant to those who would profit from an individual's death. Plus, Hollywood and organized crime have very similar thought processes...funnily enough.

As to the latter example, simply have a mechanism where they can call on a rights holder to prove they're still around either by recent public appearance or appearance before the court. Put in a certain "cooldown" time (a year or so from their last appearance) to prevent people from harassing a creator with constant defenses and away you go.

While I generally agree with that, I understand that having the works immediately available in the public domain could very well place undue hardship on the creator's family should the death be sudden and unexpected. "Normal" people have life insurance policies generally tuned to their income to provide for that, but in the case of a a professional "creator" of works, quantifying that income can be tricky, and I don't think the loss of rights should be immediate to the family of the creator if one exists.

Also, my utter lack of faith in humanity says that particularly unscrupulous individuals would "arrange" things so that an author who didn't want to sell the rights to their work would have the creator killed and poof! Public domain now for me to create my crappy movie and destroy the work. While I wish I could believe that people would never sink so low, this IS an article about movie studios trying to claim a major film trilogy made NO money at all. If they thought they could get away with it and make money, I don't doubt that some of them would do it.

I can see a 20 year period after death being reasonable as any children they had should be grown capable of self-support by then and the incentive of making a derivative work of something 20 years old will often lose its allure unless it's a seminal work of culture in which case that's EXACTLY the compact society has made with the creator...we get the stuff back to inspire the next generation of creators. The current system we have is simply abusive of society as a whole though.

Funny you should mention that...since that was what Mythic referenced in their pre-announcement materials. :)

http://www.walloftext.info/2009/01/mythic-was-right-no-official-forums.html An interesting way to do an announcement at least...

Television (from Merriam-Webster) - an electronic system of transmitting transient images of fixed or moving objects together with sound over a wire or through space by apparatus that converts light and sound into electrical waves and reconverts them into visible light rays and audible sound (emphasis mine)

televised over the internet - means that the television is going out over the Internet to computer endpoints. That the television SET is often abbreviated as television is simply laziness and a bastardization of the language, not that the usage in the summary is incorrect.

Off-topic a bit...but if you're looking for a more substantive method to kill trees for your bathroom reading now that EGM (and others) are gone, I would recommend Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series: www.bathroomreader.com Surprisingly good stuff, with an appropriate length on their stories for bathroom reading.

Back on topic, it is sad to see projects get shut down. I skimmed a few EGMs and every once in a while they would have some tidbit of information early. Still those exclusives were few and becoming farther between as more and more publishers shifted to the online format. As has been said many times already, print isn't the best way to reach most gamers these days, and that trend isn't going to suddenly reverse itself.

Still, good thoughts and well-wishes to those who've been adversely affected by this and their families.

With apologies to Ron White:

"Real life driving is not like a racing game, and I'm quoting a judge on this one"