dingleshu/heroleaguegameserver

Hero League Sandbox's Game Server

League Sandbox Game Server

This repository is now closed to further contributions

Message from @MythicManiac

(You can find the old readme here)

What happened?

On August 9th 2022, Riot Games issued a cease & desist to me personally, demanding that this GitHub repository and the associated Discord server to be taken down on the basis of them supposedly infringing Riot's copyright. I have no reason to believe the repository is violating Riot's copyright rights, and I’m not operating and haven’t operated a private League of Legends server. While I'm glad to help protect Riot's copyright rights, it’s not clear to me what rights they think have been violated and what they think my role might have been in that regard. I’m also a huge advocate of Open Source and GitHub collaboration. I informed them regarding all of this.

Like any content creator, Riot has every right to enforce its copyrights. Even though their demand letter was vague, I think it was sent out in good faith. It would be a different matter if Riot was sending out false claims and abusing the legal system for their gain, but I don't believe that to be the case here. In any event, it looks like they had a simple misconception about the extent of my involvement with this project.

What's next?

Legal allegations aside, this incident has had me re-think my involvement with the project. Given that I haven't been an active participant since 2018, it doesn't feel right for me to retain administrator permissions in the main fork of the project.

Likewise it's in the spirit of open source for maintainers to change over time, and I believe that's long overdue in this case. In fact you could say the maintainer already changed in 2018, I just didn't transfer them my admin credentials.

Based on these reasons, and in light of Riot's wishes, I've decided the best course of action is to archive this project, closing it to further contributions.

I believe archival to be a good solution as that ensures any prior contributors can still use their contributions e.g. as a part of their portfolio (something I know older contributors have done & continue to do) while still signaling the end of my role in its entirety.

Finally, I suggest anyone who dislikes the way copyright laws work currently to get more politically active in favor of creative freedom, and to support organizations such as the EFF.