Cross-geposted von: https://feddit.org/post/31996415
In a remarkably strange statement at a recent California State Senate hearing over the Protect Our Games Act (AB 1921, California’s Stop Killing Games-endorsed bill to compel publishers to provide ways to keep playing discontinued games), a representative of the Entertainment Software Association declared private servers for the likes of Minecraft and Call of Duty “illegal,” adding that, so far as the ESA is concerned, “we consider it piracy.”
In a statement to PC Gamer, the ESA wrote that, so far as it’s concerned, “Private servers infringe on the intellectual property (IP) rights of game publishers. Publishers reserve the right to exercise their rights against them.”



They probably meant to say servers that allow pirated clients to connect. The official server config used to have that option - not sure if it still does.
Yes, you can still turn off validation, at least on Java edition - you can even host your own validation server via drasl and similar, but that requires the server to have config options set to use your custom auth (and probably skin) server, and your client to have the libauthinjector mod installed.
Works great as an alternative to whitelisting IP’s to play with friends, and means you can’t have your Minecraft account deleted because you swore on your privately hosted server and a friend hit the report button.