Game publishers don’t want copyright on ‘forgotten’ online games to disappear

The Entertainment Software Association is opposing a call to extend a US copyright exception for preserving legacy games to online games. According to some, these games are in danger of disappearing without that exception.

The ESA, to which almost all major game publishers are affiliated, has asked the US copyright office not to extend the existing exception in the dmca for non-online games to online games, TorrentFreak reports. At the end of last year, several organizations and game fans requested that the existing exception be extended to online games so that it can also be kept. It is not yet clear when the agency will make a decision.

This concerns so-called game preservation exemptions, exceptions that provide that copyright does not apply to older games that might otherwise be in danger of disappearing or no longer being playable. With these exceptions, private parties such as libraries or museums have the right to keep old games playable through the use of emulators and thus to preserve them.

However, these exceptions do not apply to games that require a connection to an Internet server, so many more recent games are not covered. The moment the servers are taken offline, this also means that certain games that are only played online disappear for good. That threatened to happen with Star Wars Galaxies, for example, when the servers were shut down at the end of 2011, but the game remained accessible via emulators.

The game publishers have no problem with the current exceptions, but don’t want them to apply to online games as well. According to the publishers, this would allow outsiders to recreate online game environments with server code that is otherwise not public. According to the ESA, this allows an entire game to be simulated and re-released and made available to the public. The organization believes this is going too far, because it can lead to direct competition.

According to The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, a museum in California, among others, it is now very important to be able to preserve online games and the exception in the dmca is necessary for this. The museum also points out that the possibility to play online games via a LAN connection is often no longer supported and that even single-player games often require an internet connection.