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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

Dumb. Just make it legal to reverse engineer the software, the community will take care of the rest, in a way the community actually wants, instead of getting just the bare minimum compliance from the original company, if they even still exist.

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I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.

I don't know about California, but AFAIK reverse engineering is legal, but breaking DRM protection isn't, so what companies did was to put DRM in their software, hence the reverse engineering became illegal.

yep, that is what I meant by the DMCA, but I should probably have been more clear.

You want the "community" to reverse engineer the game server, where all the game logic lives, from the game client? This is the state of many online only games.

Of course it should be legal to reverse engineer software you own, but you have to actually have access to the software to reverse engineer it.

People did it for World of Warcraft, and continue to do so with each expansion.

I can host and play a WotLK server locally, offline on my desktop with AI player bots with minimal issues thanks to the work of the community

WoW is slightly more popular than the average abandoned game. These kind of reverse engineering efforts (re-implementation really without access to the original server) are possible but require huge efforts and thus rarely happen.

We can do both! This seems more viable for the moment, unfortunately. Challenging copyright gets much more pushback than even pro-consumer obligations like these.

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