They really don’t want you to copy that floppy.
October 25th saw an announcement from the Video Game History Foundation: the US Copyright Office has rejected their application to have an exemption from the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
This was a hard fought 3-year battle against industry lobbyists, which makes the loss all the more crushing. It puts a damper on the VGHF’s work towards supporting the Software Preservation Network. Both the VGHF and the SPN have been working towards getting access to digitally publish out-of-print games for the sake of preservation.
The point of this work is to provide a library of digitized, emulated games in an online archive for the use of researchers. Unfortunately, the DMCA stands against that; ostensibly made to protect the rights of IP holders, it sees a fair amount of fire from the end user. Notably, a recent California law was passed requiring companies like Sony and Ubisoft to clarify that users aren’t buying a game, but rather paying for a license that could be revoked at any time. Hey, remember when stupid people insisted that the digital future wouldn’t be an absolute nightmare for your rights as a consumer? I sure do.
IT’s worth noting that the exemption the VGHF and SPN sought would still have kept these preserved games from the general populace. Even so, publishers still saw it as a potential threat; the Entertainment Software Association (yes the E3 people) put serious effort into getting this exemption denied. The final ruling saw concerns raised by the ESA that this exemption would pose “significant risk that preserved
video games would be used for recreational purposes.“
The VGHF and SPN went down swinging, though. They did, after all, cite the fact that roughly 87% Videogames in the US released prior to 2010 are not available on modern platforms. While every form of media in human history has some losses, that is an appallingly high number for such a recent form of media. Nonetheless, the ESA considered even the proposed restrictions too loose for their liking, as it provided too much discretion on the side of those handling those archives. The judge also noted that this exemption for preservation might harm the legacy video games market.
That said, the VGHF has pledged to fight on, even if the ESA has stated that there would never be enough protections in place that they would allow such an exemption. And it’s good that they’re not giving up the fight; after all, these companies very frequently have little to no financial incentive to do this sort of archival work themselves.
Source: CBR
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