Does this ruling have any impact on Air Crash or Maritime investigation? Government mandated black boxes on ships and aircraft are also presumably difficult to access. Yet I assume that a warrant is not required in the case of an aircraft accident to access the black box?
Minor comment but by abbreviating Metropolitan Police to Metro Police it sounds like you are talking about a transport system like the Underground. The Metropolitan Police (sometimes known as The Met) are the police force that covers the whole of London.
We do also have a specific police force that covers the transport network (most commonly seen at railway stations). These are the British Transport Police.
As well as punishing the dev studio, this also punishes the board game designer and publisher and reduces the legitimate ways of buying digital versions of board games. While this is certainly not the main purpose of Valve's enforcement action, it does drive people towards things like Table top Simulator, which is also sold on Steam. That game does have legitimate board game modules to download where money goes back to the publisher, but these are swamped by fan made modules of pretty much every board game under the sun, where the publisher and author don't receive a penny.
Perhaps a more appropriate action by Valve would be to replace the advertising on the game page with a prominent notice about the fake reviews, but allow their customers to make an informed choice whether to continue to buy the game or not.
Say what you like about Prenda Law and the issues there, but the issue of non-accessible websites is a really serious one. Millions of people around the world are prevented from accessing websites that the rest of us take for granted because they fail to follow the basic guidance as referenced in these lawsuits - using actual text not pictures of text, providing alt-text for images, ensuring that text boxes are labeled correctly, not using visual-only CAPCHAS, etc.
This is not rocket science and does not need to impact the look or operation of your website in any way. It just means that all of your potential customers or potential users of the service provided by your website can actually use it.
Bravo for Mr. Hansmeier for going after people who willfully discriminate against the disabled.
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Flight and Ship Data Recorders
Does this ruling have any impact on Air Crash or Maritime investigation? Government mandated black boxes on ships and aircraft are also presumably difficult to access. Yet I assume that a warrant is not required in the case of an aircraft accident to access the black box?
Metro Police?
Minor comment but by abbreviating Metropolitan Police to Metro Police it sounds like you are talking about a transport system like the Underground. The Metropolitan Police (sometimes known as The Met) are the police force that covers the whole of London. We do also have a specific police force that covers the transport network (most commonly seen at railway stations). These are the British Transport Police.
Punishes more than the dev studio
As well as punishing the dev studio, this also punishes the board game designer and publisher and reduces the legitimate ways of buying digital versions of board games. While this is certainly not the main purpose of Valve's enforcement action, it does drive people towards things like Table top Simulator, which is also sold on Steam. That game does have legitimate board game modules to download where money goes back to the publisher, but these are swamped by fan made modules of pretty much every board game under the sun, where the publisher and author don't receive a penny.
Perhaps a more appropriate action by Valve would be to replace the advertising on the game page with a prominent notice about the fake reviews, but allow their customers to make an informed choice whether to continue to buy the game or not.
Actually a really good lawsuit
Say what you like about Prenda Law and the issues there, but the issue of non-accessible websites is a really serious one. Millions of people around the world are prevented from accessing websites that the rest of us take for granted because they fail to follow the basic guidance as referenced in these lawsuits - using actual text not pictures of text, providing alt-text for images, ensuring that text boxes are labeled correctly, not using visual-only CAPCHAS, etc.
This is not rocket science and does not need to impact the look or operation of your website in any way. It just means that all of your potential customers or potential users of the service provided by your website can actually use it.
Bravo for Mr. Hansmeier for going after people who willfully discriminate against the disabled.