On last week's show, my colleague PJ Vogt and I interviewed game designer (and hero) Tim Schafer about his decision to fund his latest game entirely through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Over the course of the 60+ minutes that we spoke to him, we got way more than we could possibly use on the show about what inspires him, how he approaches game design, and how to tell an interesting story. Since we thought other parts of the conversation might interest listeners, we decided to cut a second interview and post it on the blog. Enjoy, and please let us know what you think in the comments below.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

Kickstarter is a crowd-funding website where people ask others to contribute money to their creative projects. Recently, game developer Tim Schafer took in $3.3 million from fans for an untitled, undesigned video game he estimated it would cost $400k to make. Schafer talks to OTM producers and fanboys PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman about removing publishers from the process of making games.

You can listen to more of this interview by following this link!

The OTM staff choose a few of our favorite things.  Please, please leave us comments below and enjoy.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting that don't make it onto the show end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

On last week's show we spoke to German media professor Nikolaus Peifer about Hitler's Mein Kampf entering the public domain. Listener Chuck Strinz wrote in to tell us a story about how in 1939, Adolf Hitler's American publisher engaged in a copyright lawsuit against an American journalist who published a tabloid version of the book without permission.

Before Alan Cranston became a US Senator for California, he was foreign correspondent in Germany for the Independent News Service. In a particularly colorful 1988 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Cranston recounts seeing an English-language version of Mein Kampf on display at Macy's bookstore in 1939, but when he picked it up,"[he] knew it wasn't the real book because it was much less weighty, it was much thinner.  It turned out it had been edited so that a good bit that Hitler wrote was left out."

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting that don't make it onto the show end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

Interested having the On the Media blog piped directly into your favorite blog reading service? Of course you are! You can add on the media's blog to your RSS feed by following this link, or pasting this URL into your browser: http://www.onthemedia.org/feeds/channels/otm/on-the-media

Thanks, and happy reading.

Last month, we spoke to government transparency activist Carl Malamud about his plan to publish safety standards that are incorporated into law. These standards regulate things like water treatment, building design, even bike helmets, but since they are copyrighted by the industry organizations that write them, if you want to read them, you have to pay upwards of hundreds of dollars. Yesterday, Malamud published the first batch of these standards on his website, public.resource.org.

We only have an hour of air time a week to report on stories that we find compelling, but for every story that warrants coverage on our show, there are dozens of incremental stories, small but interesting media tidbits, and updates to stories we've previously covered. For these smaller stories, we like to keep our listeners informed through the On the Media twitter feed. We've decided to collect our favorite media stories for the week in a recurring blog segment we're calling "our week in tweets." Please contribute in the comments, or just join the conversation on twitter!

Unless you were dead or in jail yesterday, it was nearly impossible to miss the interview that President Obama did with ABC News about his support of same-sex marriage. ABC aired an excerpt from the interview at 3PM yesterday afternoon, but they were scooped by almost 10 minutes by Reuters Deputy Social Media Director (and former ABC employee) Matthew Keys.

This week, a British high court declared the self-described "most resilient BitTorrent site" guilty of "massively infringing on copyright", and ruled that British ISPs must block access to the site. Since The Pirate Bay is infamous for telling legal interlopers to sodomize themselves with retractable batons, the team at The Pirate Bay doesn't seem too concerned.

Earlier this month, the California 9th Circuit court of appeals decided a case called Minority Television Project v. FCC. The case concerned San Francisco station KTMP, a public television station that had been fined for carrying paid corporate advertisements. The 9th circuit upheld the ruling, and in the process, struck down a more than half-century old ban on political and issue advertisements airing on public airwaves.

In February, we aired a piece by Rick Karr about a boycott of the academic publisher Elsevier, for practices that academics and academic librarians said were prohibitively expensive. Of particular concern is a practice called "bundling," which requires libraries to subscribe to numerous periodicals they had no interest in so they might get a few that they wanted. A new memorandum by Harvard Library's Faculty Advisory Council makes their concerns about academic periodicals explicit, by saying the existing pricing model is untenable:

The staff of OTM again pick a few of our favorite things.  Please leave us comments below and enjoy.

The past year we've heard stories about hacking, from The News of the World scandal to the exploits of groups like Anonymous and Lulzsec. But the way the media uses the word 'hack' diverges sharply from the way it's used by actual hackers. On the Media Producer Alex Goldman explores the history of the word and how its meaning has shifted over time in a story that originally aired in September of 2011. 

This week on the show, we're talking with Carl Malamud, open government advocate and director of public.resource.org. Malamud's interested in what are called "incorporation by reference." The phrase describes laws that have references to safety standards embedded in them. For instance, a law that says your car has to have turning signals will also include standards about how bright or how large the turn signals have to be. Malamud's gripe is that frequently, those standards are written by private companies, and those companies hold the copyright to the standards. That means that even though the standards are part of a law everyone has to follow, citizens have to pay -- sometimes several hundreds of dollars -- for the privilege of looking at them.

Yesterday, OTM producer Chris Neary read this Wired.com article about a bill called The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law that leaker Bradley Manning is charged with having violated numerous times. Since Chris had some questions about the story and I'm kind of a nerd about hacking stuff, we thought it might be useful to have our conversation about the CFAA on the blog. Please feel free to contribute in the comments below.

As part of an investigation into the efficacy of Freedom of Information Act requests, Darrell Issa, a California Republican and the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform FOIA'd 180 government agencies for information on who is making FOIA requests, what kinds of documents they were looking for, and what kind of responses the agencies gave. Sort of a FOIA request about FOIA requests. Pretty meta, right? Well, it's about to get ... uh ... meta-er. According to a post at the New York Times Caucus Blog, a non-profit organization called Government Attic essentially FOIA'd Issa's FOIA about FOIA:

OTM producer PJ Vogt and I have been very public about our love of a video game called Team Fortress 2 (or as we nerds call it, "TF2"). So much so that in April of last year, after much goading and pleading by the two of us, Bob spoke to Robin Walker, a developer for Valve Software, the company behind TF2. Specifically, we wanted to talk to him about the frequent statements that Valve has made to the press about how in order to beat video game piracy, content providers just have to make their product more enticing than the pirates could.

ROBIN WALKER: I think it’s looking at the things that pirates are providing and asking yourselves how you can provide something better than that. So, to pick an example, if you purchased a product from us, we're going to continue working on that product after we've released it. We're sort of making that initial purchase of the product significantly more valuable over time. And so, if you somehow manage to get it for free initially but not in a way that lets you plug into that system, you know, that’s going to be a big hassle for you as you continue to try and figure out how to get each of those incremental improvements over the next few years for free, as well.