Oklahoma House Representative William Fourkiller has put forth an interesting proposition: Why don’t we add a 1% tax to all “violent“ video games? Well, mainly because that would be unconstitutional, but nonetheless the bill exists. Fourkiller’s reasoning behind pushing the tax is that — get this — violent video games promote violence and on top of that, obesity. In his defense, the proposal dictates that the extra 1% would go to youth obesity and anti-bullying organizations, but at the cost of further sullying the already sufficiently sullied reputation of violence-based video games that are not for kids anyway.

So the MPAA did release a statement saying they were now against DNS blocking. Of course, just like our buddy Representative Lamar Smith who brought back SOPA after seeming to back off, the MPAA is right back to flailing its arms and pouting in the face of the SOPA blackouts. Here, this tweet from sister-group the RIAA does a good job of setting the general mood. Yesterday, the MPAA released a statement that is so self-absorbed, so self-serving, so wrought with irony that I’m not even going to bother providing any further commentary. It speaks for itself.

The Nintendo 3DS isn’t as portable as one would think a portal gaming machine would be. Sure, you can physically move it around when playing it, and you can easily bring it somewhere without detaching it from your entertainment center and stuffing it into a big duffel bag like you’d have to do with a console, but if you want to actually use the 3D feature — the whole point of the handheld — you can’t actually move the unit or your head around, or else the screen will be rendered visually indecipherable. Now, with the Japanese release of Kid Icarus: Uprising, the Nintendo 3DS will make use of a stand. That’s right, a thing you plop down on a table, then attach the 3DS to while, amusingly for people who don’t actually have to use it, actually holding the unit anyway.

In this wide, wild world of social media, companies are always trying to find a way to get into your treasure trove of personal information. I mean, it must be tantalizing knowing that all that information is sitting out there, but most of it — if you’re smart — is locked down. That’s why companies have been moving towards ad campaigns that use all your Facebook information to do something “really cool!” Orbit Gum, for instance, lets you turn your Facebook information into an abstract gum design on a digital pack of gum! Amazing right! Oh, and only requires that you hand over access to, you know, all your Facebook data! Yeah!

So if you’ve been holding your breath, hoping that the amendment process might make SOPA a little less horrifying, you should probably stop because you’re going to suffocate. About two dozen amendments were slogged through yesterday during a grueling 11.5 hour session, with most of the important SOPA-limiting ones being thrown in the trash. Some amendments are passing, though. Mostly ones that make SOPA even more of a terrifying monster, like an amendment that passed only a few hours ago granting ISPs the same protection whether they block a specific piece of infringing content or just go the lazy route and nuke the whole site regardless of what a court order may specify. Which one do you think they’re going to do more often?

A hearing concerning proposed amendments to the widely-feared SOPA bill is going on right now. It’s being streamed on Keep The Web Open and you should take a listen; it’s almost as heartening as it is infuriating. As you might expect, there’s a lot of back and forth, and it goes a little something like this:

Representative1: SOPA is actually counterproductive, will encourage piracy, and severely hamper free speech.
Representative2: Well I’m not a nerd, but I disagree.

It’s kind of staggering how often the discussion turns to who the “nerds” are, whether or not they understand what they’re talking about. It’s also kind of staggering how often the representatives who assert that they aren’t nerds use this fact as a way to support their statement, backhandedly suggesting that the nerds are nerds and don’t really know how real things work. Like the Internet for instance. The Internet. And yes, they are literally saying “nerd.” A lot.

Getting videos pulled from YouTube seems to be all the rage these days. First we had Viacom pull the trailer for The Last of Us for absurd reasons, and now Universal is following suit by having an episode of Tech News Today pulled from YouTube for the sole reason that the episode covered the MegaUpload song debacle. The episode in question contained two clips of the song — only one of which was played with the accompanying audio — during a discussion of the impending lawsuit between MegaUpload and Universal. Apparently, those short clips felt like salt in the wound to Universal, who had the episode pulled immediately and successfully, despite the lovely little thing we like to call “fair use.”

As you may know, Viacom is particularly jealous of its copyright. Viacom videos on YouTube that aren’t supposed to be there do not last long at all. In addition to that, it seems that Viacom has moved on to getting rid of videos that are only tangentally related to it, like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us trailer. Yesterday, the trailer was pulled by from YouTube, leaving a hole in the game’s official site, all on the grounds that Viacom somehow owned it just because it initially aired on the VGAs on Viacom-owned Spike TV. It’s back now, but come on.

Piracy. It’s a crime. You’d think an anti-piracy group would know that well. Well Dutch anti-piracy group BRIEN either doesn’t know or doesn’t care because they pirated a song for their anti-piracy PSA. In 2006, the group asked musician Melchior Rietveldt if they could use his song in their PSA. Rietveldt agreed, but under a set of very specific conditions, namely that it only be played at a specific film festival. When BRIEN went on to recycle the PSA on tens of millions of DVDs without his permission and without compensating him for it, they were infringing on his copyright all over the place.

I understand that everyone is protective of material to which they hold the copyright. I understand that it’s important that they have control over it, but some recent shenanigans involving Warner Bros. have shown, yet again, the fissures in a system that errs on the side of taking things down at a moment’s notice. It seems that Warner Bros. has fessed up to filing all kinds of takedown requests at HotFiles regarding material they had no kind of actual copyright claim to, including some open source software.