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By: Alex Nelson

Fortnite is a large-scale multiplayer video game which allows 100-players to battle against each other as they race to find weapons, build structures to protect themselves, kill the opposition, and become the last person standing. For the non-gaming community, Fortnite is still worth paying attention because it is a cultural phenomenon amongst the younger generations. From June 2018 to March 2019, 125 million new players registered for Fortnite, putting the total number of registered players at nearly 250 million. Fortnite is free to download and play but includes a great deal of in-game purchases. Even though the initial game is free, these in-game purchases can provide a staggering $203 million in profit per month.

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By: Simrit Hans

Missouri House Bill 2044, entitled “Parental Oversight of Public Libraries,” is courting intense controversy because of its bold approach to modern censorship. Coverage of the bill has honed in on the bill’s apparent designs to imprison librarians and ban reading materials. The bill’s sponsor, Republican Ben Baker, sits on the Elementary and Secondary Education Committee and is a minister, missionary, and former professor at Ozark Bible Institute. In an interview regarding the bill’s inspiration, Representative Baker explained that he introduced the bill because of library reading events featuring Drag Queens and what he views as “an agenda by certain groups to introduce children to inappropriate adult themes using the vehicle of the tax funded library to do so.” He claims that his bill does not contain any provision to ban literature or jail librarians, which is how it’s being reported. He laments: “Most of the media and negative response is from those who are too lazy to read the actual bill but instead form their opinions based on headlines that are not objective.”

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By: Justin Brascher

The National Football League (NFL) is the most watched sports league in the United States. For example, in 2019 roughly three quarters of the top 100 most-watched broadcasts in America were NFL games. Because of this, the NFL maintains very tight control over its television rights and makes billions every year in Television rights deals with the major networks. However, some of that control may be taken away from the NFL and placed in the hands of the individual teams themselves, depending on the result of a federal suit that is currently being appeal to the Supreme Court.

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By Eleanor Lyon

“You never want a good crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emmanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, once famously said. It seems that Attorney General William Barr and Senator Lindsey Graham were listening.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Senator Lindsey Graham was planning to introduce legislation which would purport to hold tech companies accountable for allowing child pornography to be shared on their sites. The central change proposed by the bill is that it would allow for companies to be sued for recklessly distributing child pornography. If this sounds like a reasoned and principled stand to you, you might want to look a little more closely at what it means to “recklessly distribute” child pornography.

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By: Emily Donohue

As suggested in Part One of my two-part series on the application of the first sale doctrine to digital sales, the legislature should make clarifications and updates to The Copyright Act to apply the first sale doctrine to digital property, and end the chilling effects of uncertainty on innovation in the secondary sales market.

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