Online Game Archive and Nuking the Moon
Some notes & quotes from recent reads:
Can an Online Library of Classic Video Games Ever Be Legal?
Quotes:
For years now, video game preservationists, librarians, and historians have been arguing for a DMCA exemption that would allow them to legally share emulated versions of their physical game collections with researchers remotely over the Internet. But those preservationists continue to face pushback from industry trade groups, which worry that an exemption would open a legal loophole for "online arcades" that could give members of the public free, legal, and widespread access to copyrighted classic games.
Research institutions can currently offer remote access to digital copies of works like books, movies, and music due to specific DMCA exemptions issued by the Copyright Office. However, there is no similar exemption that allows for sending temporary digital copies of video games to interested researchers. That means museums like the Strong Museum of Play can only provide access to their extensive game archives if a researcher physically makes the trip to their premises in Rochester, New York.
Notes:
This is an interesting debate, as on one hand, scholars from most creative and broadcast/publishing fields have remote access to the catalogs of work maintained by relevant archives, but video games are different: the companies that own the relevant IP are worried that online repositories of “research only” games for scholars would ultimately be used by players wanting to engage with that IP for free—playing the games for fun instead of education.
There’s another debate to be made here about whether it’s even possible to keep this sort of thing from going online and becoming widely available if the IP-holders clamp down too hard, but that’s not the argument the seemingly well-meaning (and genuinely focused on scholastic pursuits) archivists are making, here.
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