3 Count: Hidden Games

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1: Pharrell Williams Did Not Commit Perjury in ‘Blurred Lines’ Case, Judge Rules

First off today, Tyle Aquillina at Entertainment Weekly reports that a judge has ruled that Pharrell Williams did not commit perjury during the famous Blurred Lines trial.

The Blurred Lines case pitted the estate of Marvin Gaye against Williams and Robin Thicke. The Gaye estate accused the duo of infringing the Marvin Gaye song Got to Give it Up when making Blurred Lines. As evidence of this, they pointed to a GQ interview where Willias said he “reverse engineered” the Gaye song.

The estate believed that this directly contradicted Williams’ in-court testimony and amounted to perjury. Though they had already won the actual lawsuit, this matter dragged on but now the judge has ruled that the term “reverse engineered” is vague and there’s no evidence that Williams knowingly committed perjury. As such, the judge denied a request for $3.5 million in fees that were denied as part of the copyright lawsuit.

2: Copyright Spat: Google to Pay $76m to French News Publishers

Next up today, Al Jazeera reports that Google has agreed to pay French news publishers some $76 million over the next three years to French publishers for the rights to continue displaying their content in Google News.

The move comes after new European Union regulations are set to take effect that require search engines to pay news publishers for content. The agreement will see some 121 French publishers share a pool of $22 million per year for three years.

That said, Google will still have to reach individual deals with each publisher. This broader deal was announced previously but the financial details were not disclosed.

3: Microsoft’s Edge Extensions Store Hosted Illicit Copies of Sonic and Mario Kart 64

Finally today, Jay Peters at The Verge reports that the Microsoft Edge extension store was, until recently, playing host to pirated copies of various video games including Mario Kart 64, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and more.

The matter was made worse by a now-deleted tweet by the Microsoft Edge team that highlighted the games in their app store. One user that downloaded the Mario Kart game noted that the extension itself was just an emulator, but it automatically installed an unlicensed ROM of the game to play it.

The games have since been removed as has the tweet. However, according to reviews for the games, they had been available since at least October, leaving open the question of how they remained available for so long.

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