In a blog post republished on Gamasutra, Barbara Jones (a shareholder in Greenberg Traurig’s Corporate and Securities practice group, a member of the Global practice group and the Emerging Technologies Team, and co-coordinator of the firm’s Conflict Minerals Compliance Initiative) discusses the video game industry's compliance with the Securities and Exchange Commission's new conflict minerals rules.

The American Civil Liberties Union is calling its recent efforts to petition President Barack Obama to veto CISPA a smashing success, with 49,513 signatures so far. The civil liberties group also took out a full page ad on popular political website (found here) Politico yesterday urging members of Congress to oppose the controversial cybersecurity bill.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) details what information could be shared between government agencies, corporations and other entities if CISPA is ever passed and signed into law by President Barack Obama. With the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence set to mark the bill up next week, and the full House scheduled to vote on it the week after that, it is important that Internet users understand why this bill is bad news for them.

A letter signed by 33 organizations and nine individuals asks the top ranking lawmakers in the House of Representatives (Reps. Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers) and the United States Senate (Sens. Patrick Leahy and Charles Grassley) to make an exception for unlocking electronic devices to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Recently a petition signed by over 110,000 Americans asked President Barack Obama's administration to make the same exception.

A letter signed by 34 different organizations has been sent to the White House this week urging President Barack Obama to veto Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) if it crossed his desk this year. Last year the President promised to reject the House bill if it was not drastically overhauled to provide more privacy protections and remove some other elements like immunity from litigation for corporations that share information with the government.

The American Civil Liberties Union had a simple message for Congress today about CISPA or any other plans for sharing internet user information between corporations and government intelligence agencies: keep cybersecurity information sharing out of military hands.

Today lawmakers in Connecticut held a public meeting to get feedback from the community and interested parties on several pieces of legislation that have been proposed about video games in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting in December. Supporters of legislation to regulate video games told members of the General Assembly’s Children’s Committee that they believe that there is a causal link between playing violent video games and violent real-world act committed by youth.

Internet privacy and advocacy group Demand Progress is continuing its fight against CISPA (the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) and is mobilizing the Internet community to contact their elected representatives to let them know that they do not care for CISPA. Demand Progress said today that over 90,000 members have expressed their displeasure with CISPA, which was re-introduced last week by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) - without out any changes from last year's bill.

On January 18, 2012 something amazing happened: the Internet community, advocacy groups, internet personalities, popular websites, and even some brave politicians banded together to send a message to lawmakers and special interests that backed the poorly crafted SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) legislation.

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D - West Virginia) has introduced a bill that would have the U.S. National Academy of Sciences study how video games and other media like films and television affect children. The bill would also expand studies already conducted by the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission.

Advocacy groups ACT-UP Paris, April, and La Quadrature du Net issued a joint statement this week demanding that the European Parliament's European Commission and Member States be more transparent in the negotiations of a number of trade agreements including The Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), the India-EU, Thailand-EU, Moldavia-EU Free Trade Agreements, and more.

Longtime Internet trade group NetCoalition is slowly shutting down its advocacy and lobbying operations after a decade of services to the technology industry. The news comes from new termination reports during the recent lobbying quarter from the three major firms that conducted D.C. business for NetCoalition (TwinLogic Strategies, Jochum Shore & Trossevin PC and Moore Consulting). Those reports state that these groups will no longer be working for the group.

Earlier this week we reported that Foxconn - the company that helps build many of the products that are popular in the West from companies like Apple, Sony, Samsung, Microsoft and Nintendo - reported that it found underage interns working in one of its plants in Yantai, China. Today we have learned that that plant is responsible for assembling Nintendo products.

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has put up a form that interested parties can sign onto concerning some changes that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has planned for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

While companies like Sony, Nintendo and many other are being called out for their use of "conflict minerals," a new SEC policy about disclosure of these materials being funneled out of the Democratic Republic of Congo will apparently not affect retailers.

Nintendo has scored a rank of "0" from the watchdog group, the Enough Project. Out of the 24 companies on its list, Nintendo was the only one to receive the lowest rank possible. The Enough Project is a watchdog group that follows the money trail of "conflict minerals" from the Democratic Republic of the Congo where warlords are fighting for control of the country.

Open Congress offers some biting commentary on why - even after a myriad of amendments have been offered to make it more palatable to those worried about privacy - the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 is bad news. The non-profit, non-partisan public resource that tracks how political influence is bought with campaign funds says that it cannot support the bill unless one important amendment is made.

While some in the Linux community have lauded the idea of Steam coming to the popular open-source operating system, some like Richard Stallman think it is not a good idea. Richard Stallman is better known as the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU operating system. He has said publicly that charging users for DRM-protected games on an open-source platform is "unethical".

Internet advocacy group Public Knowledge is taking aim at data caps and the companies that love them with the release of a new white paper and letters to several companies asking them to release information about their data capping processes. In a white paper released earlier this week the group called for government oversight of mobile and wired broadband providers who use data caps, noting that these companies should disclose detailed information about data caps. Public Knowledge wants U.S.

Cory Doctorow, who you may know best as the gentleman behind the wonderful Boing Boing web site, has a brand new column in The Guardian examining why a former defender of SOPA would suddenly decide to switch sides.

A post over at the Better Business Bureau blog by Marjorie Stephens contends that EA may have committed "false advertising" when it was promoting Mass Effect 3. The author of the post says that when EA talked about how the game's ending would work, they may have described it in a way that was misleading to consumers. Marjorie Stephens then list two examples from EA on the ending:

AllOut.org, an online advocacy group representing the LGBT community, issued a press release last week announcing an online petition with over 60,000 signatures supporting Electronic Arts' and BioWare's inclusion of same-sex relationships in its games. Last week EA responded to a flood of letters and emails from two family advocacy groups haranguing them for "exposing children" to same-sex relationships in games like Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic and accused them of giving in to pressure from LGBT advocacy groups.

The Center for Copyright Information, an organization that was created to oversee a new anti-piracy regime negotiated by content providers and internet service providers last summer, has begun to take shape and some of its key leaders are surprising. The organization announced on Monday that the names of its executive director and several members of its advisory board. At face value, the choices to serve as the architects of the "Copyright Alert" system could strike a balance between the interests of rights holders and the rights of users.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is taking up arms against the PROTECT IP Act in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and they want your help to do it. The advocacy that supports internet rights and freedom of speech online says that these new bills are "a threatening sequel to last year's COICA Internet censorship bill" and that this legislation "invites Internet security risks, threatens online speech, and hampers Internet innovation."

Whoever said you can't fight city hall has never been to the great state of Wisconsin. State legislators (admittedly a bit more powerful than city hall) found themselves overwhelmed with calls after trying to cut the throat of Wisconsin's state educational Internet system. The public phoned members of Wisconsin’s state Assembly and browbeat them into submission.

The calls were so overwhelming, according to published reports, that lawmakers in the state immediately put together revised legislation for WiscNet that would allow it to receive funding from the University of Wisconsin's Division of Information Technology. The Assembly quickly added provisions to the state budget, with final approval taking place early this morning. WiscNet provides Internet for most of Wisconsin's public schools and libraries, and many citizens in the state think it is a vital and important service.

The French chapter of International human rights organization Amnesty International has released an iOS game called Bulletproof. The goal of the game is to raise awareness about human rights violations around the world and to raise money for the organization. The game, playable on iPhone and iPad, cost a mere 0.99 cents. The group celebrates 50 years of fighting for human rights around the world. It's hard to hate on Amnesty International, unless you're a maniacal dictator that jails and tortures people..

The game was created by Mobigame and is sponsored by French ad agency La Chose. In Bulletproof, players tap the touch screen to stop bullets from a firing squad trying to execute a condemned man. While the design sounds simple, the message is powerful. You can send a powerful message by buying it and supporting the organization. You can buy it here.

The Recording Industry Association of America and its partners at the International Intellectual Property Alliance recently submitted their ‘piracy watchlist’ recommendations to the Office of the US Trade Representative. The RIAA pointed to two countries as being the worst of the worst when it comes to intellectual property theft: Spain and our comrades to the north - Canada.

This is particularly interesting because this week Spain passed a tough new law to combat piracy. The Sinde law (nicknamed for its sponsor) is aimed at shutting down file-sharing sites that traffic in illegal downloads. Even though the public and some in the Spanish movie industry opposed the law, it will become the rule of the land by summer, says TorrentFreak. But the RIAA claims this is just a baby step and that even more needs to be done to combat theft.

According to information gathered by Puffbox, the United Kingdom's Department of Transport has spent £2,785,695 ($4,425,576.95 USD) on a free-to-play educational MMO called Code Of Everand. That number includes costs for the fiscal year 2010 - 2011. The game, developed by U.S.-based Area/Code (Spore Island for Facebook and Drop7 for iOS), was designed to teach kids road safety. The game allegedly has 170,000 users worldwide.

Details on the game can be found here. This Puffbox link has a breakdown of costs per player, traffic numbers and more.

Editor's note: 1 GBP = 1.58868 USD, according to exchange rates at Universal Currency Converter.

After a Fall 2010 update failed to include any videogames, the National Parenting Center’s Seal of Approval awards focused on the 2010 holiday season includes four such entries.

The winners, part of the NPC’s 20th annual incarnation of the awards, were chosen following two months of testing by both parents and kids in the NPC’s test centers. Entries are judged by “a variety of levels including, but not limited to, price, packaging, design, stimulation, desirability, age appropriateness, instructions and more.”

A series of television ads run in the UK for the PlayStation 3 game Heavy Rain rankled a few feathers due to their timing and violence.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) reported receiving 38 complaints in response to four Heavy Rain ads, with viewers criticizing the violence of the ads and a perceived glamorization of violence. The objectors also worried that the ads were run at a time of day when children could view them.

The last complaint about the ads was that they were run around the same time that a shop keeper in Huddersfield was killed in an armed robbery. The Heavy Rain ads all depicted a scene in which a shop keeper was repeatedly threatened by an armed man with Heavy Rain character Scott Shelby watching. The versions differed in how the Shelby reacted to the situation; he either intervened, attacked or negotiated with the armed robber.