When the player count fades, online games often end up shuttered by publishers who can no longer pay for the servers and staff to maintain them. The EFF has asked for an exemption to copyright rules that make reverse-engineering netcode an iffy legal proposition. The aim? To allow online games to live forever on third-party servers.
Kyle Orland:
The EFF's requested exemption would also apply to single-player games that have to "phone home" to since-dead authentication servers to confirm an activation key, making them unplayable without modification. The group carves out space for restrictions on massively multiplayer games, though, saying the exemption should not apply to "'persistent worlds,' in which the game's audiovisual content is primarily stored on the developer's server and not in the client."
I love this idea so much. When do we start?
Among the other exemptions requested: the right to fix your own car.
