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.”

  • taiyang@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    7 hours ago

    Reading this article, ESA feels like the evil archenemies of the Stop Killing Games folks. As SKG put it, the talk of illegality was to mislead a Californian legislator too busy to fact check.

    That said, the real fight ESA is pushing is more in regards to private servers for MMOs and other always-online games that SKG wants to be legal as part of preservation. I personally disagree with ESA in that regard, although I can understand their legal argument regarding the lawsuits on World of Warcraft private servers, mentioned in the article.

    (Though, my two cents, I personally feel “free market” should mean official servers are better and earn their subscriptions: more people, more reliable, better content, etc… but they usually aren’t. So fuck them, lol).

      • taiyang@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        4 hours ago

        If they used official closed source code, there is some legal issues, if challenged, but if they reverse engineered the server code then it’s a lot more leeway (similar to emulators). Most private servers I’m familiar with are the former, though, and since the assets and such are generally client side, nothing the server hosts is illegal.

        Though again, I don’t even think that should be illegal but c’est la vie; it’s copyrighted code.