The Litigation Landscape Of Private Server Actions In Asia

Private servers are widely used in the gaming world for players to host online games in a private environment. They can be used in order to emulate dead online games, games without servers and unplayable, or used to add features an owner of the private server may want to include in the game. Private servers operate within a grey area because in order to operate them, owners have to mimic the server in some way. This can be done by copying the source code of the game, which is usually illegally extracted and constitutes an infringement of copyright.

In Asia, legal and enforcement authorities have been clamping down against illegal activities relating to private servers. We outline below the enforcement framework on private servers across different jurisdictions in Asia.