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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/ea-shuts-down-fan-run-servers-for-older-battlefield-games/
Since 2014, a group of volunteers going by the name Revive Network have been working to keep online game servers running for Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, and Battlefield Heroes. As of this week, the team is shutting down that effort thanks to a legal request from publisher Electronic Arts.
"We will get right to the point: Electronic Arts Inc.' legal team has contacted us and nicely asked us to stop distributing and using their intellectual property," the Revive Network team writes in a note on their site. "As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."
EA's older Battlefield titles were a victim of the 2014 GameSpy shutdown, which disabled the online infrastructure for plenty of classic PC and console games. To get around that, Revive was distributing modified versions of the older Battlefield titles along with a launcher that allowed access to its own, rewritten server infrastructure. The process started with Battlefield 2 in 2014 and expanded to Battlefield 2142 last year, and Battlefield Heroes a few month ago.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jelizondo on Sunday October 29 2017, @12:22AM (3 children)
Other people had advance this notion, similar to the idle land laws: tax any intellectual property. Fail to pay the taxes and the property is forfeited.
EA is not making money out of its old intellectual property, so probably would not like paying a tax or fee to maintain it, so it should devolve to the public.
Corporations get a free-ride on intellectual property to the detriment of lawful, tax-paying citizenry. I mean, they pay a one time fee and get to keep the property basically forever. (Search for Disney, Mickey Mouse and copyright extensions to see examples.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @01:09AM
Here is the amazing thing. Trump is keeping them all so busy arguing over silly things. Another one will not happen. They will be too busy arguing about whatever he tweets today.....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @03:01AM (1 child)
How would you scale the fees? If it is a flat fee of say $10k/yr then EA would pay that forever. It must scale up based on project earnings or it will be a useless tax that only hurts the little people.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 29 2017, @06:21AM
That one's easy.
Make the fee go up each year. Start with something ridiculously low, like a dollar. Then double it the next year. Then double it again. 25 years later, your fee is $16 million. This sounds about right if you consider the original copyright length (14 years, extensible for another 14), before the Mouse [techdirt.com] started making a mockery out of the entire concept. And the difference between what a regular person can pay and a multinational company can pay can give you only another 10~15 years of copyright (which is close to an original term extension -- 14 years).
Of course, that's not likely to happen. Hell, requiring you to *register* your work was considered too onerous so now everything is copyrighted by default.