danomac writes “Canipre, a Canadian anti-infringement enforcement company, has been using photos on their official website without permission. This company hopes to bring U.S.-style copyright lawsuits to Canada, and they are the company behind Voltage’s current lawsuits. It says right on their website, ‘they all know it’s wrong, and they’re still doing it’ overlaid on top of the image used without permission. Multiple photos from different photographers are used; none of them with permission. Canipre’s response? ‘We used a third party vendor to develop the website and they purchased images off of an image bank,’ they said, trying to pass the blame to someone else. Some of the photos were released under the Creative Commons, meaning they could have used the photos legally if they’d provided proper attribution.”

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Noiser writes “The Israeli pop singer Aya Korem published her new song “Computer Engineer” as a website that shows translation to the Perl programming language along with the lyrics. Perl is quite a good match, given that the Perl community has a long tradition of publishing “Perl poetry”, and this song proves that this tradition is very much alive. No Flash is required to view the website, so if you are an HTML5 geek, have no worries.”

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The global version of the Xperia Z now available for $630 at Sony’s American website. [Read more]

The creators of the 2002 GameCube horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem will launch a crowdfunding campaign for a “spiritual successor” called Shadow of the Eternals on Monday, the game enthusiast website IGN said today.

IGN says it will release the full details on the game on Monday; for now it has posted a trailer (above).

Denis Dyack, head of Eternal Darkness developer Silicon Knights, is reportedly involved with the project. However, the website that the trailer points to shows that the game is in development by a brand new studio called Precursor Games. It has a Facebook page that was founded on July 9, 2012, but its website has no information other than a countdown clock to the commencement of the crowdfunding drive.

One assumes the connection between Silicon Knights and Precursor will be spelled out by the impending IGN story and crowdfunding campaign. The crowdfunding site Kickstarter has not been mentioned specifically, leaving open the possibility of Shadow using a different crowdfunding site or a custom one.

In October, as part of a behind-the-scenes report on the difficult development process of Silicon Knights’ last game X-Men Destiny, Kotaku reported that the Canadian developer was down to a staff of five employees, and had been working on a pitch for Eternal Darkness 2 that it was showing to publishers. If this report was true, it’s possible that Shadow of the Eternals is this very pitch, with the Eternal Darkness branding removed. Certainly its developers are not downplaying the connection to the GameCube game.

Shortly following the announcement, a NeoGAF member did some digging and turned up a Google cached version of an old page hosted on the Precursor Games website. It appears to contain an in-progress version of the crowdfunding pitch, in which the game is referred to by the title Shadow of the Ancients.

The page says that the game will be a series of 12 episodes, each with 2-4 hours of gameplay. Like Eternal Darkness, it will feature in-game “Sanity Effects” that play with the player’s mind, although it will ask the community to create and submit their own concepts for these. Again, according to this page, the game is planned for release on the PC and Wii U, around the third quarter of 2014. The game’s plot is described thusly:

In Shadow of the Ancients, we follow the investigations of Detective Paul Becker, who is called to one of the bloodiest massacres in Louisiana state history. Only two survivors remain from a brutal conflict between two rival cults at the abandoned Pleasant View Sanitarium: one a suave, clean-cut business man – and the other a hardened, rogue-like biker.
Both men have seemingly lost all memory of who they are – and yet they are compelled to kill each other. As Becker begins his interrogations of the suspects, their combined recollections create the world of Shadow of the Ancients.

You play Paul Becker, a Louisiana police detective. You also play Clara Rusznyák, a handmaiden to the noblewoman, Erzébet Bathory.

Even assuming this information was accurate at the time the page was created, since this is clearly a work-in-progress, these details (like the game’s title) may have changed. We’ll see what IGN has to say about the matter on Monday.

DavidGilbert99 writes “For a completely online movement, the lack of an official Anonymous website is certainly strange. The reason, according to Anonymous itself is down to the lack of a hierarchical structure. However, one Anonymous-linked group could be about to change all that, having succeeded in securing $55,000 in funding for a website. Is this the beginning of Anonymous going mainstream? From the article: ‘The @YourAnonNews (YAN) Twitter account has over one million followers and has leveraged its popularity to successfully raise over $55,000 (£34,000) through a crowd-funding campaign on the Indiegogo website. The funding drive was established to allow those behind the YAN account to set up a website of its own which will allow it “to collect breaking reports and blog postings from the best independent reporters online.”‘”

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Last summer we followed the odd case of lawyer Charles Carreon, as he went after Matthew Inman, creator of The Oatmeal webcomic, with legal threats. Carreon had been hired by FunnyJunk, a website Inman accused of stealing his comics. Carreon demanded $20,000 in compensation for Inman’s “false accusations.” Inman declined, and then used the publicity to solicit over $200,000 in donations, which he gave to charity after sending Carreon photographs. Carreon dropped the suit against Inman, but the saga continued. A satirical website was set up about Carreon, which caused him to invoke the legal system again. The article documents the absurdities, which included further legal action and a song. Now, however, Carreon is reaping what he has sown; a judge has ordered him to pay over $46,000 for his role in the legal circus.

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Peter Eckersley writes “At the EFF we were recently contacted by the organisers of the Melbourne Free University (MFU), an Australian community education group, whose website had been unreachable from a number of Australian ISPs since the 4th of April. It turns out that the IP address of MFU’s virtual host has been black-holed by several Australian networks; there is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that this is a result of some sort of government request or order. It is possible that MFU and 1200 other sites that use that IP address are the victims of a block that was put in place for some other reason. Further technical analysis and commentary is in our blog post.”

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