Mitchell Zimmerman, chairman of Fenwick & West's Copyright Group, was recently quoted in a Wall Street Journal article entitled, "Digging Through the Game Glut."
The article profiles Games1.org, an online reserve of video games that have garnered high user rankings and can be played in Web browsers. The site was developed by Utah software engineer Matt Misbach and includes knock-offs of famous games from Nintendo, Atari, Sega and others.
Because Misbach doesn't get permission from the games' creators, Zimmerman says he could be vulnerable if designers or developers threaten a copyright infringement lawsuit. But enforcement actions against end-user infringement, which rendered Grokster and other peer-to-peer networks extinct, is less likely, according to Zimmerman.
A case against a visiting gamer...would be "arguably stretching the reasonable limits of copyright law," Zimmerman says.