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Section 1201 of the US Copyright Act has been a source of concern for game preservation specialists for years. This is the section that forbids to bypass the DRM, which has resulted in the loss of many games over time. Restrictions on local gaming have been relaxed in the past, but online gaming could still disappear. In the latest copyright review, museums and other archival institutions were finally allowed to archive online games.
Ink DRM in law is a recurring problem for consumers and anyone who wants to make older technologies work. Fortunately, the law allows the Librarian of Congress to issue exceptions to the Copyright Act every three years. The current update also allows consumers to bypass DRMs to repair their electronic devices. On the gaming side, the efforts of the San Francisco Museum of Digital Arts and Entertainment (The MADE) and other organizations have resulted in online games included in the exemptions.
Most games nowadays include an online component. Sometimes it's just a server connection for verification or live update quests. Then you have games like MMORPGs that are played entirely online with other people. When a developer decides to remove support for a game with online components, regardless of their purpose, the game ceases to exist. Even if you have a local copy, it will not work without the server. Now, museums, libraries, and other archival institutions will be able to stop digital rights management for these games to work.
Asheron's call was lost several years ago when the servers were shut down.
There are, however, several important caveats. This is not a license for anyone, even a museum, to make games available to the public with a hacked server. Archived games must be accessible only on the premises of the eligible group. If a game requires an active server component, as in the case of MMORPGs such as Star Wars Galaxies or Asheron's Call, the archiver must acquire the server code legally. This means that the developer will have to give it willingly, and most will not.
The founder of MADE, Alex Handy, expressed his approval of the decision, but he notes that there is still a lot of work to be done. Bypassing the DRM on the server or the local copy of the game allows you to archive abandoned titles, but the server code is still difficult to obtain. Many companies prefer to let a game die forever than to give the code for archiving, but hopefully that will change.
Now read: Nintendo wants to close 2 gigantic ROM sites, non-profit organizations want a DMCA exception to preserve abandoned online games, and a new Australian bill could ban VPNs in an effort to eradicate Hulu, hacking from Netflix
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