novelist
Latest
Alt-week 9.15.12: The ultimate wind machine, Egyptian Lego and the office of our dreams
Alt-week peels back the covers on some of the more curious sci-tech stories from the last seven days. Sometimes we wonder, what would we have ended up doing if we didn't spend our time trawling the web for the week's best alternative tech stories? We could have been paleontologists, novelists, engineers, or if we were really lucky, worked for Google. Instead, here we are bringing you some of the more colorful tech-tales from the last seven days, which we're really not complaining about. That said though, at least on this occasion, we got to taste a bit of all the above. This is alt-week.
Lawsuit alleging copyright infringement in Assassin's Creed dropped, Gametrailers settles
Novelist John Beiswenger has dropped the lawsuit against Ubisoft, in which he alleged the Assassin's Creed universe stole ideas from one of his books, Link. Gametrailers, whom Beiswenger sued in the same case, settled with the author on May 18 under undisclosed terms.Beiswenger voluntarily dismissed all action against Ubisoft before any formal adjudication on the validity of his claims could begin - the Internet made up its mind about his claims a while ago. Beiswenger has dropped the case, citing the expense of federal litigation:"I filed the Complaint and Motion for Preliminary Injunction in federal court because I believe authors should vigorously defend their rights in their creative works; otherwise, the laws protecting them simply have no purpose," Beiswenger's official statement reads. "Regrettably, the resources required to defend those rights are unavailable to many individual creators. As a result, rampant infringement is occurring with impunity."Beiswenger was seeking $5.25 million in damages and the potential cessation of all Assassin's Creed endeavors, including the third game currently due out in October. Beiswenger filed the dismissal "without prejudice," meaning he can pick up the claims and the case again in the future.If he ever does, we don't think Ubisoft will sweat it too much; the Internet has already done most of the debunking already, unless Beiswenger can somehow prove that he owns the rights to "spiritual and biblical tones" or "assassinations."
Novelist suing over Assassin's Creed has his lawyer respond to gamer rage
Author John Beiswenger poked the sleeping dragon that is the Internet when he filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft, claiming the Assassin's Creed franchise infringes on copyrights in his novel, Link. Namely, Beiswenger says Assassin's Creed stole themes such as "assassinations," "spiritual and biblical tones" and a battle between good and evil from Link, which was published five years prior to the first Assassin's Creed title.Beiswenger is seeking up to $5.25 million in damages. The lawsuit could also delay the release of Assassin's Creed 3, a fact that wiped the grins from many a gamer's face and set a few (hundred) to review-bombing Beiswenger's Amazon pages.Beiswenger's lawyer, Kelley Keller, has now responded to Eurogamer on the negative reaction and her client's claims: "We understand that many gamers are upset about the litigation and potential for delay in the release of the next Assassin's Creed video game, and as a result of that anger have been posting negative comments on Amazon - and other forums - about our client and his novel Link. However, copyright laws exist to protect authors and creators from others who copy or create works that are, under the law, substantially similar; failure to enforce copyright laws renders them meaningless. "The Amazon 'bombing,' storm of negative comments and threats to our client have no bearing on the appropriateness, merits or outcome of this suit. They have no material effect on the legal claims."Keller says she believes the similarities in Link and Assassin's Creed are more than coincidence and that despite the five-year delay in filing charges, the lawsuit was brought within an applicable time period.We don't know about you guys, but the only applicable time periods we see here are the American Revolution, and October 2012.
Ulysses 1.6
Call me crazy but I bet there are a few would-be, and some actual, novelists out there who read TUAW. Am I right? Thought so. If you are amongst that august group then you might be tickled by the Blue Technologies Group's text editor: Ulysses. It was built from the ground up with writers in mind with features that include: Grouping of files Semantic Text editing (this allows you to create your own markup language. You can mark up your document in a way that makes sense to you and then export it and see those words that you marked as bold show up as bold in the resulting document. Trust me, this is cool stuff) A single window for all your documents Powerful search And that is just scratching the surface. Read the full feature run down to find out all the details. Ulysses now comes in two flavors: Ulysses is the full featured application which costs 79.99 € (half off for EDU buyers) and Ulysses Core which has a subset of features (check out this chart to see what the Core version leaves out) and will set you back 39.99 € ( 25.99 € for education buyers).
