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If a company no longer supports (Shuts down) a MMO...
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Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
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no ... it is their property. They can do whatever with it .. including forbid anyone from playing the game until the copyright expires.
If you had enough money and time you could possibly create an interesting court case, if you had purchased any digital property in the game.
By law software developers are required to provide you reasonable access to any digital property you have purchased.
Say you buy a hat in an mmo, and that mmo pulls the plug. You no longer have access to property you own.
Confusing part is you lease access to the software, but digital property sold as a result of the software is considered real property. Would blocking your access be paramount to theft?
One of those issues that needs to be settled considering some people are buying 100's of thousands if not millions of dollars of virtual property.
I mean internationally it has already been address and ruled as real property as far as Entropia is concerned.
Why the argument would go beyond this amazes me....
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
I thought there already was a lawsuit in the US courts based on that premise. People who paid for MMO clients no longer have access to their software due to the company shutting down the MMO. This wouldn't apply to most free-to-play MMOs but there are still plenty that charged for client downloads at least when they first released.
OP: They don't have any legal ground to prevent people from running privately-owned servers as long as the servers don't violate copyright law. From what I understand, the server code is almost always created from scratch due to the difficulty of obtaining the code from the company.
Yes and no. When you go out and buy the 60 dollar box, or digitally for that matter, you aren't buying the game. You are buying a license to rent the game from the creators. You agree to all of this in the terms of service that you have to accept in order to play the game (you can choose to decline the terms of service and take it back for a full refund where you bought it).
Now some companies will allow private servers to exist because the server code was built from scratch or the original company doesn't care that much since it is no longer running. A great way to get them to care is if you start making a profit off your private server. Case in point was the WoW case where blizzard was awarded 88 million due to copyright infringement and the private server using microtransactions to turn a profit.
You can get around most lawsuits if you are in a country that doesn't recognize certain laws where the game company is based but for the most part you have no say and you have no right to start up or run a private server since the game you are running is not yours.
Copyright laws trump terms of service. If a company takes access away (by shutting down servers permanently) that doesn't remove the legal obligation to provide access to the software you purchased a license for. I found a link to one lawsuit but didn't find the results of the lawsuit. It may be ongoing.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130802/12464524046/ea-faces-class-action-suit-over-sports-titles-online-gaming.shtml
I would be happy if game companies agreed to release their server code as open-source upon shutting down MMOs.
The problem is a large corp will gobble it up and copyright the license for their own profit.It would be like scooping up a full fledged complete game for free,ya not a good idea.I don't know the proper answer but there should be a way for player's to access the game world on their own PC even,i guess sort of a single player game then,at least you have something to show for the money you spent.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
MMO companies own the code to their own games, hence why EULA's are so comprehensive, and why players have to agree with them to play a game, to date nobody has ever managed to overturn this, despite there being several failed attempts, which as you have no doubt discovered, have not been successful.
Which is why private servers made without permission of the ones who own the code, are for the most part illegal, and why even if they are in a country whose laws are a bit, shall we say, 'lax' to allow such illegal activities, if they can't be prosecuted for that reason, they can be IP blocked from the rest of the internet, its really down to whoever owns the 'code' to determine whether they can be bothered to do so.
A lot of these issues are far from settled law...and quite frankly, the last thing an MMO publisher is going to want to do is to drag a bunch of disgruntled clients into a courtroom. But there's a few things we ought to keep in mind (and what follows is by no means legal advice)
--When a publisher cancels a service, the EULA doesn't apply, as the client is no longer an "end user" of the publisher. Copyright, however, does still apply.
--A publisher of a creative work cannot claim an interest in a copy of that work after it is sold. This is what is called "the first sale" doctrine and is a cornerstone of commerce. Without it, publishers could legally seize your CD collections, your books, your DVDs and everything else whenever they felt like it, turning your purchase of said media into an unconscionable contract and void. If you purchased the disks, you own the disks and everything on them.
--Copyright does place a limitation on duplicating media for distribution. This may make use ask the question on whether a greyshard for a dead game is 'duplicating' the media, or if it is just using the media as is one's right of first sale.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Should, no, but it is good service.
Microsoft did it right with Allegiance, even though that is not quite an MMO. They not only gave away the rights to host private servers, they open sourced the code for both server and client. (See http://www.freeallegiance.org/ if you are curious.)
Allegiance was a multiplayer space shooter/RTS hybrid done just right. Winner of GameSpots 2000 "Best Game No One Played" award.
From what I read of the lawsuit it seems the guy bought some games with the intention of playing them online. EA said that they had unlimited online play but the guy was saying if he knew EA was going to shut down the online play portion he never would have bought the games. Now either he never did his homework before he bought the games(EA already announced they would be shutting down the online part) or he bought the game and then after a certain period of time EA shut down the online part.
Either way I would see him wasting a shitload of money on lawyers fees to be told that EA did provide unlimited online play until they decided to shut down their servers. While online was enabled you could play an unlimited amount of time therefore EA did not do anything wrong.
I'm not a judge but at this point I would then start throwing things at the guy for wasting my time and then ridicule him until he broke down in tears......but that's just me.
First sale doctrine just stops them from seizing your discs but if the MMO has been shut down then feel free cause they save me the hassle of throwing them into the garbage. You own the disc but the information contained on said disc is not your property, it is the property of whatever game company developed it. Sure you can turn around and sell the discs to someone if you want but without a valid serial or even functioning game servers then I am pretty sure you are going to be hearing back from said person.
Define reasonable...
I ersonally think 10 years of access is still reasonable for MMOs... somewhere some judge should have an opinion on this...
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
The information is owned in the sense that the publisher can claim no interest in how the purchaser makes use of it. Use in this sense is to enjoy it, tinker with it or modify it. Use in this sense is not for purposes of replicating it for redistribution, which would be a violation of copyright.
And indeed, the central issue of recreating servers of unsupported MMOs seems to hinge on whether this is the owner making use of what he owns? Or is it a redistribution of a copyrighted "orphan work"? If it is the former, the owners have the right to build a server. If it is the latter, they may not have the right.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Terms of service , End user agreements are void, both dont count anywere but the US and thats just a small part of the world.
Making private servers is Legal, with a capital L, as long you write the server code yourself and use legal copy's of the game client there is nothing any company can do, the area were it becomes more grey is when ppl start using downloaded client copy's and or start altering the game client thus breaking IP Copyrights and Code Copyright.
Theres a lot of scare scare lawsuit lawsuit rumors and bluffs going around but there has not bin a single case were a company has succesfully started a case against a emulator / server host that used Fan created software and original unmodded clients.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
No, they own it, it's their work, their assets.
They get to do what they want with it.
If they don't want other people using their work that's their right.
As far as people saying it's legal you would have to show that in "your" particular case that it's legal.
For instance, you might be able to make a private server and invite some friends but if you create the server and start charging money as if you were the original company then I highly doubt that would be legal.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Thing people forget is that the client software on their computer only represents part of the whole 'package' when it comes to MMO's, and that the code on the servers is heavily copyrighted, use of which is strictly controlled, and the players, despite whatever arguments they might use, have no rights to that code without the absolute permission of the company that owns it. Most private servers rely on not getting caught than anything, because when the owners do get caught, the chances of ending up with a custodial sentence if they are in the USA or EU, is fairly high, though really it depends on whether the company that owns the code can be bothered to hunt them down.
This is patently false. Severlin from the Asheron's Call team recently stated that they have no plans on shutting down the service, even after they open up the ability for people to host their own servers.
I think it was more of an assumption, when they announced they would allow others to host their own servers, the assumption was that they would be discontinuing the game themselves, i am both surprised, and impressed however, that they are supporting private servers, the original Asherons Call is after all, the best one in the series.
For those who say: it is "their" property they can do what they want ... the EU ruled otherwise and it didn't do so to protect mmo gamers!
The ruling revolved around a lot of very expensive software that companies use and build there businesses around. If SAP tor Oracle announced tomorrow that they had decided to shut down and all companies using their software would have to stop using it because they "owned" it - well you might not know who SAP or Oracle are today but you would tomorrow and probably when your next paycheck was due.