ESA Calls Minecraft Community Servers 'Piracy'

Mojang hosts a page on its official website where you can download the software to run your own Minecraft server. The end-user licence agreement explicitly states that players can "install it on a server and host online play." Community servers are not some underground operation; they are one of the pillars Minecraft was built on.

So when Jennifer Gibbons, the Entertainment Software Association's Vice President of State Government Affairs, told a California State Senate committee on June 29 that Minecraft community servers are "illegal" and "not in any way affiliated with Microsoft," the reaction online was immediate and deserved. Gibbons was appearing before the Senate's Business, Professions, and Economic Development Committee to argue against Assembly Bill 1921, the Protect Our Games Act, which would require publishers to keep server-dependent games playable or offer refunds when support ends.

During the hearing, California Assembly Member Chris Ward pointed out that games like Minecraft and Call of Duty already use community-hosted servers as a working model for keeping games alive. Gibbons interrupted to call those servers illegal. When a committee member asked if community servers were "the black market of video games," Gibbons agreed and went further: "Yes. In fact, we consider it piracy. We have pending lawsuits against private servers right now."

I cannot overstate how absurd this is. Calling Minecraft community servers piracy is like a car manufacturer selling you a toolkit and then reporting you for theft when you use it. Mojang doesn't just tolerate player-hosted servers; the company actively provides the files, documents the process, and promotes community servers on its own website. This isn't a grey area. This is a feature.

The ESA Walks It Back

After the clip went viral, the ESA issued a revised statement that quietly softened the language. The new version specifies that "private servers that host or distribute copyrighted game content without authorization" infringe on publisher IP rights, a significantly narrower claim than calling all community servers illegal piracy. The statement also pivoted to safety concerns, arguing that private servers "do not uphold the same trust and safety standards" as publisher-run infrastructure. As reported by Tech Raptor, this is a clear retreat from what Gibbons actually said on camera.

The safety argument is worth addressing because it's doing a lot of heavy lifting for the ESA here. Yes, some private servers lack the moderation tools that official platforms have. But framing every community server as a danger to players is a convenient way to avoid the real issue: the ESA was lobbying against legislation that would protect consumers from losing access to games they paid for, and it used misleading claims about one of the most popular games on the planet to do it.

AB 1921 ultimately failed to pass the committee, receiving only four yes votes against three nos, with four abstentions. A representative for Stop Killing Games alleged that the ESA "did not fight this with facts" and instead "fought it with fear," targeting legislators who wouldn't have the background to challenge claims about how game servers work. The movement has said it plans to pursue amended versions of the bill in other state legislatures and is exploring federal options. Minecraft creator Markus 'Notch' Persson has previously backed the initiative, telling players to "host your own servers" and arguing that "if buying a game is not a purchase, then pirating them is not theft."