The American burgerrechtenorganisatie EFF believes that gamers should have the right to onlinefunctionaliteit of old games try to repair it yourself if publishers servers offline. As gamers that now want to do, is legislation in the united states is a legal obstacle.
The EFF has, therefore, an official request submitted to an exception for games that the publisher no longer support internet-capable in the DMCA. Customizing the authentication mechanism of a game or the reverse engineering of communication protocols would not be more illegal if this happens to the old games to be able to continue to play, or for research and study purposes.
As publishers the power plug from the servers for old games with a onlinecomponent pick up, gamers are in for a problem, set the EFF. This happens according to the organization, often one and a half to two years after the release of a game and it often involves core functionality, such as onlineauthenticatie of the game for him to play.
The EFF also points among other things to the disappearance of the matchmakingservers for Civilization 5 and Mario Kart Wii. Also had a lot of games suffer from the going offline of the commonly used GameSpy servers. Projects to the onlinecomponent to restore its own servers, stumble, however, often legal obstacles.
“A lot of games, such as Nintendo’s Mario Kart, use special protocols between the server and client to communicate,” writes the EFF, “To which communication is to replicate the client expects from the servers, gamers the protocol to reverse engineer.” In addition, players sometimes the game software to change the connection to the new servers as possible and to prevent games onlinecheck do. In the latter case it fails the authentication if the servers are offline and the game is not to play.
Also in the Netherlands, the customize games, such as the work of authenticatieservers that are offline, in conflict with the law. The copyright act defines in article 29a, that the intentional circumvention of “effective technological measures” is unlawful.
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