The EU's new copyright filters will be catastrophic for the web, but they're going to be even worse for your favourite game

This might be a problem for Minecraft servers (it depends how the servers deal with mod content), but it’s unlikely to impact most game companies like Blizzard. They’d only have issues if they, like Valve, distributed user-created content for multiplayer games. That’s fairly rare. Most companies prefer to let users deal with mod distribution themselves. So it’s the fans that will get hosed - as sites like Moddb that host mods would be impossible, if they’re responsible for making sure there’s no copyrighted content. The problem would make Youtube’s content matching algorithms look like child’s play. Because you’d potentially have video, audio, text, images (which are likely to be cropped and altered) and 3D models that could be infringing - all put into a package, possibly in proprietary format (and different for different games), possibly protected from being opened up and examined. So any sort of site that does mod hosting would definitely be dead. Game companies would simply not make games that allowed the distribution of user-created content within the game, which wouldn’t be a huge impediment.

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