The 2008 ScreenBurn Festival
March 7 - 11, 2008
Austin, Texas

Former MPAA Vice President Rich Taylor has signed on for a top position with gaming-industry lobbyist outfit the Entertainment Software Association. Taylor will assume the role of Senior VP for Communications and Research, reports GamePolitics. During his time with the MPAA, Taylor battled illegal downloading, even visiting college campuses as part of an anti-piracy campaign, and the gaming industry sees his expertise in intellectual property rights as a boon to keeping creative content guarded (and lucrative.) Says Mitch Bainwol, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, “It’s a great day for the content industries to have a talented veteran rejoin our ranks. Rich is a great addition to the ESA team. We look forward to working with him and all those at ESA on issues important to the content community.”

The enormous economic potential of the growing video game industry is re-affirmed by today’s news of the Vivendi Activision deal. According to a report in MSNBC, this $18.9 billion deal “would create the world’s biggest video games publisher and bring the hit titles World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty under one corporate roof. The French group, whose activities span recorded music, pay-TV and mobile telephony, said yesterday that it planned to merge its Vivendi Games unit with Activision, a Nasdaq-listed pioneer of computer games. It would then seek to raise its stake in Activision to a maximum of about 68 per cent. The complicated proposal underlines how Vivendi’s once lossmaking games division has been transformed into a desirable business by the success of World of Warcraft, an online fantasy game from Vivendi’s California-based Blizzard Entertainment.”