Entertainment Software Association: Preserving Abandoned Games is the Equivalent of Hacking & Piracy

[6souls]

Doing so will "Destroy" the Video Game Industry

EFF, along with law student Kendra Albert, is asking the Copyright Office to give some legal protection to game enthusiasts, museums, and academics who preserve older video games and keep them playable. We’re asking for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions (Section 1201) for those who modify games to keep them working after the servers they need are shut down. Many player communities, along with museums, archives, and researchers, want to keep the games they own playable after publishers shut down the servers the games depend on. Section 1201 creates legal difficulty for these communities, which is why we’ve asked the Copyright Office to give them an exemption.

Section 1201 is often used by the entertainment industries not to prevent copyright infringement but to control markets and lock out competition. They say that modifying games to connect to a new server (or to avoid contacting a server at all) after publisher support ends—letting people continue to play the games they paid for—will destroy the video game industry. They say it would “undermine the fundamental copyright principles on which our copyright laws are based.”

ESA also says that exceptions to Section 1201’s blanket ban will send a message that “hacking—an activity closely associated with piracy in the minds of the marketplace—is lawful.”

Games abandoned by their producers are one area where Section 1201 is seriously interfering with important, lawful activities—like continuing to play the games you already own. It’s also a serious problem for archives like the Internet Archive, museums like Oakland, California’s Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, and researchers who study video games as a cultural and historical medium. Thanks to server shutdowns, and legal uncertainty created by Section 1201, their objects of study and preservation may be reduced to the digital equivalent of crumbling papyrus in as little as a year.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/0...s-and-archives
http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comme..._1201_2014.pdf

[tyven]

Well this is not surprising. Have EFF and the game companies ever squared off before?

[Cantih]

I don't know, but my guess is if they have, it might have been something involving DRM, so that's where to start looking if there is anything.

The interesting thing is, if EFF gets this exemption, then running servers for MMOs that have ended service will become a legal thing. (Though getting ahold of the original server side code and using it, idk.)
I wouldn't mind a chance to try Tabula Rasa, and I'm sure City of Heroes players would be ecstatic over the possibility of playing again.

EDIT EDIT: Motherfucking Chromehounds.