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
    7·
    2 days 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 reverse engineered, 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.

    Edit: former and latter are two different things, and I need to be more careful when I change my sentence structure after writing it.

      • taiyang@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Oh I have no idea, I don’t play that game but I imagine it’s none. Every MMO server I’ve seen was reverse engineered. The lawsuits in those cases are probably frivolous, although you never know how courts go.