Fans of abandoned online games are close to bringing back certain “dead” titles — if the US Copyright Office doesn’t side with the studios, who this week began pushing back against their efforts. The US Copyright Office, which oversees the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), renews its provisions every three years. These provisions include the specific rules which criminalize any attempts to circumvent copyright protection, and the exemptions to those rules. During the renewal, it takes public comment and petitions on whether any new exemptions should be made. A new comment, submitted last October by the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE), asked the Copyright Office to make an exemption to the DMCA for “abandoned” online games. If granted, it would mean that museums and archives would be able to run their own servers for these games, essentially resurrecting them for small-but-devoted fanbases. The MADE emphasized how important these games would be for understanding the history of the medium: For future historians, video games like Minecraft and Second Life will say as much about 21st century America as Dicken’s Oliver Twist does about 19th-century Britain. That is, if these games actually survive into the future. Unfortunately, video game preservation lags far behind other media and is impaired by technological challenges and legal limitations. … So, despite their ever-growing cultural importance, online video games continue to turn into digital dust when their copyright owners cease to provide access to an external server necessary for the game to function—i.e., when these games are “abandoned.”… [Read full story]
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