Catch me on the corner selling server.jar out of a long trenchcoat.

Cross-geposted von: https://feddit.org/post/31996415

In a remarkably strange statement at a recent California State Senate hearing over the Protect Our Games Act (AB 1921, California’s Stop Killing Games-endorsed bill to compel publishers to provide ways to keep playing discontinued games), a representative of the Entertainment Software Association declared private servers for the likes of Minecraft and Call of Duty “illegal,” adding that, so far as the ESA is concerned, “we consider it piracy.”

In a statement to PC Gamer, the ESA wrote that, so far as it’s concerned, “Private servers infringe on the intellectual property (IP) rights of game publishers. Publishers reserve the right to exercise their rights against them.”

  • Koenig2005@feddit.orgEnglish
    25·
    9 hours ago

    What’s the point in Microsoft shooting against “their own” product? I mean, the option for public or private servers is literally built into the game. Also there is the option for playing together over LAN which you could also argue is a private server.

    • Err(()).unwrap()@lemmy.worldEnglish
      49·
      9 hours ago

      If you have the facts, you pound the facts. If you have the law, you pound the law. If you have neither, you pound the table. This is the ESA pounding the table, and the goal is to confuse the gerontocracy LARPing as lawmakers.

      • DearOldGrandma@lemmy.worldEnglish
        20·
        8 hours ago

        This is why tech has gotten so out of control in the US. In the past 40 years, this industry has had so many revolutionary inventions while our legislators on average get older and less likely to understand the newest technology, thereby making them more susceptible to being misled or misleading others. Combined with our legislators not giving a fuck about actual economics, this is how we have oligopolies everywhere in the US with cartel behavior

        • ripcord@lemmy.worldEnglish
          4·
          6 hours ago

          Things have gotten so out of control because people have gotten stupid and lazy and put up with all of this shit.

          • 7101334@lemmy.worldEnglish
            6·
            5 hours ago

            People have gotten stupid because billionaires have orchestrated the gutting of education and people are too exhausted, not “lazy”, because they’re overworked by billionaires.

            Capitalism is always the problem. Okay, very rarely organized religion or genuine natural disasters, but almost always capitalism.

          • DearOldGrandma@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            5 hours ago

            Also true. It doesn’t help that the most successful and influential people in this time-frame have also been widely manipulative by pulling the ladder to success up with them, dismantling education, and increasing the amount of sugar and other unhealthy things in our food

    • Vittelius@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      23·
      8 hours ago

      The way I see it there are two possible reasons:

      1. incompetence: The statement in question was said by ESA’s vice president for state government affairs, in other words a professional lobbyist. Video games are her day job, not her hobby. I don’t know how much she actually plays herself. It may therefore be the case that she wasn’t briefed properly or she got confused. The ESA is currently persuing legal action against certain private servers after all. The article contains specifics on those but in short: Those servers enable piracy, the Minecraft ones don’t.
      2. they are lying: the whole thing was part of a hearing on Stop Killing Games. Private servers are one of the ways to fulfill their demands. It is the industry’s position that implementing those is too complicated. Each instance of private servers existing weakens the argument. So better pretend that those don’t exist. After all gamers won’t even learn about this statement. It’s a random California state senate hearing. They don’t watch those!