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EA Shuts Down Fan-Run Servers For Older Battlefield Games (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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. It's the distribution of modified copies of these now-defunct games that seems to have drawn the ire of EA's legal department. Revive claimed over 900,000 registered accounts across its games, including nearly 175,000 players for the recently revived Battlefield Heroes.
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. It's the distribution of modified copies of these now-defunct games that seems to have drawn the ire of EA's legal department. Revive claimed over 900,000 registered accounts across its games, including nearly 175,000 players for the recently revived Battlefield Heroes.
"As diehard fans of the franchise, we will respect these stipulations."
More like die easy.
It's still their property irregardless of company size.
EA is headquartered in the USA, thus your statement above is factually incorrect.
Copyright law does not impart *ownership* to the creators of any copyrighted work.
It only provides very specific and limited rights related to distribution and performance of the work to the copyright holder, which is all they can legally use copyright to limit.
In fact the only mention of the word "ownership" in copyright law is in the paragraph stating all works under copyright are the inheritance of the public to own, once the copyright term has expired.
If a small app developer finds his apps being used without his consent he/she also has the right to request that it to be stopped.
That is also factually incorrect. Consent is not required to *use* a copyrighted work.
Consent is required for distributing that work and for performing that work.
Consent is also required when a separate work is a derivative of another work that is copyrighted by someone else.
Simply *using* that work is not a restricted right under copyright law, and the copyright owners have no legal standing to claim otherwise.
In this one particular case, the legal issue is with distributing a work under copyright and held by EA.
Distributing a copyrighted work IS a right granted to the copyright holder.
Using a copyrighted work is not a right the copyright holder has any control over.