Comment by kmeisthax

1 day ago

What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.

Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.

Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.

You'd think custom server developers would find it easy to operate in closed networks and Tor. This isn't valuable enough for the US to break Tor for. Server hosts might have a harder time but a lot of them are closed communities like Minecraft servers are, so they don't get attention.

  • > Tor

    This sounds like fairy dust for this use case. You’re playing a real time game where latency matters, and you’re running all that latency sensitive traffic through a network of relays running on altruism - each hop would introduce latency and you’d deal with contention in the network.

    The play experience would be awful.