U.S. Copyright Office Throws Gamers a Bone

New Exemptions Legalise the Preservation of Video Games With Online Authentication

As you might already expect, copying games is bad. Yes, even that Lemmings floppy disk your mum copied 20 years ago. But while booting up your favourite game from last century isn't terribly difficult if you still have the right hardware or an emulator (and the original disk, of course), many games launched today may not enjoy such a long life of replayability.

The reason for this is an increasing reliance on being able to connect to servers that provide authentication, match-making, and other online services. Running these servers in-house (or outsourced under contract) costs considerable money, which means that these games are shipped with a ticking time bomb - a sudden end-of-life announcement.  Of course, when you installed the game, you accepted the EULA which no doubt mentioned that the publishers had the right to terminate these services at any moment.

Well, we're not here to tell you that that's about to change. With the most popular of games, community patches have already surfaced that defy such agreements and restore the ability to play long after the required servers have been decommissioned and shipped off to a nearby public school.

The big news from the end of October is that the U.S. Copyright Office is siding with gamers on this one. In a document made available to the public, they have published a list of exemptions to the current Copyright Act. What's even more refreshing is that for the most part, the document is written in plain English, rather than lawyer gobbledy-goop.

One condition specified is that "an affirmative statement indicating that external server support for the video game has ended and such support is in fact no longer available or, alternatively, server support has been discontinued for a period of at least six months; provided, however, that server support has not since been restored."

If that condition is met, then gamers are permitted to copy and modify the game as necessary (provided of course that they already own it) for purposes of preserving local gameplay on a personal computer or video game console. You read that correctly. In fact, why not read it for yourself in the document? Unfortunately, "local gameplay" is one of the caveats here. The ability to restore online multiplayer and/or matchmaking services was considered, but ultimately not included in the exemption.

While No-CD hacks have existed for around 20 years, could we soon see the birth of completely legal No-AuthenticationServer patches? Could their creators legally charge a small fee for them? Could they even be distributed without malware? Will we be able to play Test Drive Unlimited 2 again?!  Have a brief look through the document (read from page 54 to see the thinking behind the decisions, or jump to page 79 for a summary), and share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: U.S. Copyright Office - A Department of the Library of Congress