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A new ruling from the Librarian of Congress is good news for video game preservation. In an 85-page ruling that covered everything from electronic control of the software to the software of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for video games and software in general. These exemptions will make it easier for the public to save the video and to share it with the public.
"The Acting Register Founding the Expansion of an Expansion in the United States", "The Librarian of Congress said. "In such circumstances, the preservation activities described by proponents are likely to be used."
These rules are definitely good news for single-player games. "The big change for single-player games happened during the last DMCA review process in 2015, when the Copyright Board decided that it was only possible for them to be protected. " Phil Salvador-Washington, DC-area librarian and archivist who runs The Obscuritory, a site that focuses on discussing and preserving obscure, old games-told Motherboard. That 2015 ruling was due to expire this year, but thanks to that it was renewed today instead.
"These rules are a big win," Kendra Albert, a Clinical Instructional Fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, told Motherboard. Albert represented the Software Preservation Network, which was one of the parties for the change at the Copyright Office. "The 2015 rules cracked the door open for many things, but the exemptions have been much more, much broader."
Today's news should be good for archivists and museums, who have long struggled with the best way to preserve video games such as Everquest gold World of Warcraft. Multiplayer games like these require both software and their software and their software. And when they manage to get an independent server running, big game companies like Blizzard have taken legal action against people running unauthorized servers.
The new rules will be disappointing for the average users who have been waiting for you and you will not be disappointed. Albert told Motherboard that the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, to allow these exemptions cover "affiliate archivists," allowing private citizens to contribute towards software preservation. "The Copyright Office specifically rejected that request," they said. "I think that they are concerned about the fact that they should stay relatively small."
There 's also a catch for the institutions that do this work, and that' s a big order.
The rules offer exemptions only for "complete" games, meaning an archivist has the original game code and the original server code to be able to use it. Any "eligible library, archives, or museum" that will be able to access the Internet. This means that it is going to be an MMO that will be able to make it work for everyone, it will only be able to play in-person by researchers or visitors. This limitation partly defeats the purpose of preserving an old MMO, World of Warcraft its character is that thousands of people play it simultaneously, which is not going to be possible if it can only be played in a museum.
Emulation or recreation of server code to get a multiplayer game up and running is also a valid exemption to the DMCA, and that's a problem. "It's very unlikely that anyone saved the server code," John Hardie, Director of the National Videogame Museum in Frisco, Texas, told Motherboard. "In all the archiving we've done, we've never had a company say, 'here's our server code' … I'd say nine times out of ten, the server code has not been archived or saved. It just gets formatted, or whatever, or just discarded with the server. "
Private servers do exist for games such as World of Warcraft and defunct MMOs such as City of Heroes. But those servers are typically not running on legal acquired software. Many of them painstakingly reverse engineer the server side software by catching packets and other data mining techniques. This kind of emulation is not covered under these new fair use exceptions.
DMCA is one of the exceptions to the DMCA and is specifically a blow to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE), which has taken this petition to the DMCA rulemaking board. MADE is currently working to recreate Habitat, a 1986 LucasArts online game and one of the earliest examples of an online virtual world. Habitat's original creators joined MADE to revive the game using the original source code and emulation of Commodore 64 and Quantum Link machines. That server-code emulation, according to our first look at these rules, would not be a valid exception to the DMCA.
"There are still a lot of legal issues around video game preservation, but these rules do some things that make it easier for institutions to preserve videogames, and that's really important," said Albert. "It's also something that the Entertainment Software Association [the group that lobbies on behalf of video game companies in the United States] has traditionally opposed. This is a result of the Preservation Network and MADE advocacy for this software. It's important to note that the [Entertainment Software Association] have not always been on the right side of this. "
Of course, it's important that the new exemptions are no doubt a victory of the current state of copyright law, it's worth wondering why we're having such big fights over giving the right to preserve massively significant artificial artifacts, especially considering that game companies often do not do the hard work of preservation themselves.
As Sarah Jeong wrote for Motherboard in 2015:
DMCA section 1201 has become a bizarre zero-sum cottage industry. Lawyers are being paid-by-no-profits or for-profit corporations-to throw their time and energy into a black hole. The result is a long and arduous fight, video game museums get to preserve video games (over the protests of the Entertainment Software Association). This is not exactly a huge victory, and at the same time, we need to ask ourselves, why was this a winner? Why was not this just clear in the first place? "
Correction: This story has already been approved by the Software Preservation Network. It was the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment that pushed for these exemptions. Motherboard regrets the error.
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