In a Reddit post summarising the decision, a campaigner for consumer movement Stop Killing Games claimed that the ESA<\/a> \u201cbrought in a high-paid, DC-based lobbyist, Jennifer Gibbons [ESA vice president of State Government Affairs], who worked the offices with claims that ranged from misleading to flatly false\u201d.<\/p>\n VGC has watched the full recording of Monday\u2019s Senate committee discussion on the issue, during which California Assemblyman Chris Ward stated that some games give the option to launch community-hosted servers, suggesting they could be an option should a game\u2019s main servers be shut down in the future.<\/p>\n \u201cMinecraft<\/a> is currently hosted by community servers,\u201d Ward said. \u201d Call of Duty [has] community servers, so it\u2019s an option that is out there, in existence here today.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re illegal,\u201d Gibbons responded, \u201cand they are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft<\/a>. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo is it like a black market of video games?\u201d one committee member asked Gibbons.<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d Gibbons replied. \u201cIn fact, we consider it piracy, we have two pending lawsuits against private servers right now, and the United States trade representative in their Notorious Markets reports on counterfeiting and piracy has named some of these big private servers as a notorious market.\u201d<\/p>\n An ESA representative has now sent VGC a statement regarding Gibbons\u2019 comments, telling us that \u201cthe ESA representative was responding to a complicated, multi-part question in which the committee was using the terms \u2018community server\u2019 and \u2018private server\u2019 interchangeably\u201d.<\/p>\n It added: \u201cPrivate servers that host or distribute copyrighted game content without authorization infringe on the IP rights of game publishers. While publishers may take different approaches, all publishers reserve the right to exercise their rights against IP infringement.<\/p>\n \u201cThe provision in CA AB 1921 that proposed these servers as a legitimate alternative to keep games running raises concerns about a publisher\u2019s ability to enforce their IP rights.<\/p>\n \u201cIn addition, private servers operate with no oversight from the publisher and do not uphold the same trust and safety standards. This could create an unsafe environment for players and be counter to the industry\u2019s commitment to fostering safe and fun game play for all players.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Entertainment Software Association has given its detailed stance on the use of private servers in games, after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":738866,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[74],"class_list":["post-738865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/738865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/738866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=738865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=738865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Minecraft lists featured servers that have partnered with Mojang<\/a>, but the option to add unofficial servers is not available on console versions.<\/p>\n