How are non-steam servers illegal?

JoeS · **Author**

Hi, i know a few friends that run a chain of popular non-steam servers and i was wondering. Are they illegal? If so, what law does it break and why doesnt valve do anything about it? Im sure its not hard to search nonsteam on game-monitor

Bend3R · 02-17-2009 , 09:28 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Why not ask them?
https://support.steampowered.com/
https://forums.steampowered.com/forums

JoeS · 02-17-2009 , 10:31 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Not sure, i was wondering that for quite a while now.

BOYSplayCS · 02-17-2009 , 10:32 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Do not talk about Non-Steam here.

**Brad** · 02-17-2009 , 11:10 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Quote:

Originally Posted by BOYSplayCS

Do not talk about Non-Steam here.

You can talk about it, sheesh. We just don't support it.

YamiKaitou · 02-17-2009 , 11:36 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Yes, they are illegal. https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=46827

Valve probably doesn't do anything about it for the same reason Blizzard doesn't do anything about the private WoW servers.

DHJ · 02-17-2009 , 14:18 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

ehh blizzad has closed alot of private servers down allreday

Owyn · 02-17-2009 , 14:40 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

o rly? O_o

slmclarengt · 02-17-2009 , 18:56 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Depending on the country you are interested in discussing legality of non-steam servers, the illegality varies.

In the U.S., the main law non-steam servers violates is the DMCA (provision of not circumventing DMCA enforcement).

In other countries, it may not even be illegal per se to operate non-steam so much as it is to operate Steam. In fact, some countries operate on an 'open' infrastructure where things must be open to modification and not tied to a specific entity (VALVe). Europe operates this way in some areas of software (re: lawsuit requiring Microsoft to release non-competitive Windows without IE/WMP), but not with Steam.

Some countries Steam just probably does not want to support or has some motive not to support.

Bail and others (particularly ones located in the U.S.) feel that since something is illegal in their place of residence, they will not support it anywhere. Funny thing is, STEAM is legal in the U.S. but not in other countries so if you ran STEAM, you could be charged in that country with violating whatever law it violates there (anti-trust or something of the sort maybe), but running non-steam is fine with them...

Hope that clears things up.

Slmclarengt

fezh · 02-17-2009 , 19:25 Re: How are non-steam servers illegal?

Quote:

Originally Posted by slmclarengt

Some countries Steam just probably does not want to support or has some motive not to support.

Totally Agree.
For example, in my country (Argentina) Non-Steam is more popular than Steam for the simple reason that is free. Since the last years, Steam is more popular in Argentina, previously the people don't know about the word "Steam"