When you don't put out a demo, some people will start asking questions… is it because the game isn't any good and the developer is afraid people will find out? Did they run out of time and the lack of a demo is a sign that the game is sloppy and unfinished? You don't want players asking those questions -- you want them trying out your awesome game and telling everyone they know about it.

As developers working on the oft-mundane, daily tasks required in making a piece of software, we often lose sight of the fact that there are also many players who love our work. For them the opportunity to talk with someone that worked on their favorite game is incredibly exciting (something we are occasionally reminded of when we get to meet the creators of our favorite games!).

Players like having ownership. It's one of the reasons why they're playing games (an active form of entertainment) rather than experiencing a self-contained work in another medium. The absolute best way to hand over the keys to your game is to make it moddable. Many of the most beloved and long-lasting games of all time are also highly moddable, and their communities live on long after the last official update. Why? Because the players took ownership and had a vested interest in the longevity and overall success of the game. This sort of relationship between player and game is only possible when the players have the power to reshape the game to their liking.

Ah, the elephant in the room. I’ll just put it this way: if the CIA can get hacked, you’re not going to be able to prevent your game from being cracked. Sorry. You can't stop piracy. Focus on building up a fanbase and higher sales through goodwill instead of trying to bend the internet to your will. If you're spending a ton of effort trying to "win the war" on piracy, then you're wasting resources you could have been used to make better games. The reason why studios like Blizzard and Valve are so successful and beloved is because they focus on delivering the best games possible, time and money be damned. Don't make enemies of paying customers by making them jump through hoops. As history shows us, in most wars there are no winners -- only losers.

Four members of the CyanogenMod software team on Monday received Galaxy S II smartphones in the mail, direct from the company at no charge.

“All four of us involved in the porting process for the first Galaxy S received a new phone,” CyanogenMod team member Kolja Dummann told Wired.com in an interview. “After the [Galaxy S II] launched in Europe, we just asked about getting some of those phones. Samsung agreed.”

The phones came with one simple directive — get CyanogenMod working on the phone.

Essentially, CyanogenMod replaces the stock operating system on your Android phone with a customized build, letting you make tweaks and adjustments that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to before. Customizations range from changing visual details — like slapping a sleek new uniform skins onto the user interface — to under-the-hood boosts like overclocking the phone’s CPU.

The fair-use issue came up as the judge berated prosecutor Allen Chiu's proposed jury instructions, which included the assertion that the government need not prove that Crippen "willfully" breached the law, in what is known as "mens rea" in legal parlance. The judge noted that the government's own intellectual property crimes manual concerning the 1998 DMCA says the defendant has to have some knowledge that he was breaking the law.

"The first prosecution 12 years later, and you're suggesting a mens rea that is akin to exactly contrary to the IP manual: that ignorance of the law is no excuse?" the judge barked.

"You didn't even propose a middle ground," Gutierrez continued. "What's getting me more riled, it seems to me I cannot communicate the severity to you of what's going on here."