Selling online games and then shutting down the service should forfeit the right to interfere with reverse engineering projects. Maybe even require opening up the service specs so reverse engineering wouldn’t be needed.
I think that’s absolutely fair, it will never happen, but I think it should. If you want a game that has online aspects of it and no longer want to host it that’s fine, but then the game should be mandated to go open source and you officially relinquish the copyright. I think that’s a very fair tradeoff, you don’t want to pay for servers anymore which means you don’t think there’s any profit left in it, so prove it by making it FOSS.
and you officially relinquish the copyright. I think that’s a very fair tradeoff
Indeed. Specifically, if a company wants to benefit from society-funded copyright enforcement, then society must get something worthy of the cost. In this case, that’s the cultural enrichment brought by the game. If the game vanishes, then the company hasn’t held up their end of the deal.
Yeah, we need solutions to this issue as it’s happening more and more with always-online games. We’re at risk of losing all these games to history without the ability to keep them in the archives
