Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game’s male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been a medium where you don’t just consume a product, you participate and interact with culture. For decades, that participatory experience was a key part of one of the longest-running video games still in operation: Everquest. Players had the official client, acquired lawfully from EverQuest’s developers, and modders figured out how to enable those clients to communicate with their own servers and then modify their play experience – creating new communities along the way. Everquest’s copyright owners implicitly blessed all this. But the current owners, a private equity firm called Daybreak, want to end that independent creativity. They are using copyright claims to threaten modders who wanted to customize the EverQuest experience to suit a different playstyle, running their own servers where things worked the way they wanted.  One project in particular is in Daybreak’s crosshairs: “The Hero’s Journey” (THJ). Daybreak claims THJ has infringed its copyrights in Everquest visuals and character, cutting into its bottom line. Ordinarily, when a company wants to remedy some actual harm, its lawyers will start with a cease-and-desist letter and potentially pursue a settlement. But if the goal is intimidation, a rightsholder is free to go directly to federal court and file a complaint. That’s exactly what Daybreak did, using that shock-and-awe approach to cow not only The Hero’s Journey team, but unrelated modders as well. Daybreak’s complaint seems to have dazzled the judge in the case by presenting side-by-side images of dragons and characters that look identical in the base game and when using the mod, without explaining that these images are the ones provided by EverQuest’s official client, which players have lawfully downloaded from the official source. The judge wound up short-cutting the copyright analysis and issuing a ruling that has proven devastating to the thousands of players who are part of EverQuest modding communities. Daybreak and the developers of The Hero’s Journey are now in private arbitration, and Daybreak has wasted no time in sending that initial ruling to other modders. The order doesn’t bind anyone who’s unaffiliated with The Hero’s Journey, but it’s understandable that modders who are in it for fun and community would cave to the implied threat that they could be next. As a result, dozens of fan servers have stopped operating. Daybreak has also persuaded the maintainers of the shared server emulation software that most fan servers rely upon, EQEmulator, to adopt terms of service that essentially ban any but the most negligible modding. The terms also provide that “your operation of an EQEmulator server is subject to Daybreak’s permission, which it may revoke for any reason or no reason at any time, without any liability to you or any other person or entity. You agree to fully and immediately comply with any demand from Daybreak to modify, restrict, or shut down any EQEmulator server.”  This is sadly not even an uncommon story in fanspaces—from the dustup over changes to the Dungeons and Dragons open gaming license to the “guidelines” issued by CBS for Star Trek fan films, we see new generations of owners deciding to alienate their most avid fans in exchange for more control over their new property. It often seems counterintuitive—fans are creating new experiences, for free, that encourage others to get interested in the original work. Daybreak can claim a shameful victory: it has imposed unilateral terms on the modding community that are far more restrictive than what fair use and other user rights would allow. In the process, it is alienating the very people it should want to cultivate as customers: hardcore Everquest fans. If it wants fans to continue to invest in making its games appeal to broader audiences and serve as testbeds for game development and sources of goodwill, it needs to give the game’s fans room to breathe and to play. If you’ve been a target of Daybreak’s legal bullying, we’d love to hear from you; email us at info@eff.org.

Netflix is making exclusive deals with podcast studios to compete with YouTube, but podcasters have mixed feelings.

So we have Kenny Chesney to thank for the breakup of Florida Georgia Line? Good to know… The duo officially announced their breakup as band back in 2022, as Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley went their separate ways to pursue solo careers. There was a lot of speculation that the duo split due to political differences between the two after Hubbard unfollowed Kelley on social media during the 2020 election. (Hubbard and his wife Hayley supported Joe Biden, while Kelley and his wife Brittney supported Donald Trump). The duo initially denied that their split had to do with politics, but it became clear that it was a nasty breakup between the two when both began telling their side of the story. But apparently there’s more to the story, and during an appearance on the Human School Podcast this week, where he detailed more about their breakup and what was going on in his personal life at the time. Hubbard says during the pandemic, his wife had just given birth to their third child, he had recently had surgery on his ankle, and obviously, the entire world was under stress due to the aforementioned pandemic. Around that time, Kelley sent him a text with a new song he’d written. Hubbard said it sounded like something Chesney would cut, and told him to send it to him. Chesney passed on it, and Kelley told Hubbard he was “taking it as a sign” to cut it himself: “He said, ‘Well, I did actually send it to Chesney. And he passed on it, which I’m taking as a sign.’ I said, ‘A sign for what?’ And he said, ‘That I should do it.'” They had discussed eventually having solo careers, though this obviously wasn’t planned, and Hubbard realized he didn’t want to be in a duo where one of them wasn’t giving “I’m not willing to do Florida Georgia Line and then have a direct competitor that’s my partner doing the same exact thing. I also told him, ‘I don’t think I deserve 50 percent of you if I’m willing to give a hundred.'” Of course, this moment led to their eventual breakup, though Hubbard insists there is no “good guy” or “bad guy,” the chips just fell where they fell, so to speak: “There’s not a good guy, bad guy — which everyone wants to do on the internet. He stuck to his convictions… I set a boundary.” To be fair, Tyler Hubbard released a song with Tim McGraw before Brian ever released solo work, and Brian later described how Tyler told him that he liked “better in person and not online.” Tyler and Hayley then unfollowed him on social media after he publicly questioned why they can’t have concerts, meanwhile others were holding Democratic protests and Biden victory celebrations during the 2020 election season. He also implied that he was flying a Trump flag at his house which was the triggering moment for Hubbard: “One of the things that triggered him was I had an American flag and another flag flying in my driveway, gated, nobody could see it.” So while Hubbard may chalk it up to people wanting to pursue some different creative paths, it certainly was more complicated than that. But it sounds like they were already drifting apart, and he says he probably shouldn’t unfollowed Kelley on Instagram, because it only added to the public noise and added pressure and stress to an already-delicate situation: “When it happens publicly, and you get millions of people weighing in, it compounds the stress.” But it seems like it might be possible that they could get back together one day…. The duo was spotted posing for a photo together CMA Awards, in addition to taking one with their wives, leading to speculation that they were on better terms and could potentially be considering getting the band back together, quite literally. Who knows if it will ever actually happen, but it’s undeniable that they were both bigger as a duo than they are individually. At the same time, there is no guarantee that they would have the same kind of success now as they did ten or fifteen years ago, because country music has changed a lot since they were popular. At the very least, I think they could reunite for a reunion tour or something one day, but music aside, it sounds like they’re at least on good terms again on a personal level. Either way, everyone should say “thank you, Kenny,” because he’s saved us from several years of horrible music and that’s something we can all be thankful for… he probably has no idea that was the catalyst for the split, but he deserves his flowers nonetheless…The post Do We Actually Have Kenny Chesney To Thank For The Breakup Of Florida Georgia Line? first appeared on Whiskey Riff.

President Trump will make an announcement in any moment, possibly related to the release of the Epstein files. Or it could be something totally different. It should be starting any moment. Watch . . .

You’re not really wishing someone a good ‘bye.’ ‘Bye’ is just an abbreviation—and ‘good’ is sort of a mistake.