The ESA says preserving old online games isn't 'necessary'
They should be careful. Copyright is a trade-off of rights. We grant copyright as an artificial carve-out of public rights in order to promote creation. But if those creations increasingly get walled off and locked away from a public that still wants access to them, by combinations of legal and technical means, we need to assess if the balance is right or if we need to reduce the copyright protections.<p>As it currently stands, support for copyright is overall quite strong - the mainstream belief is still that a fairly substantial degree of protection is justified. But the more peoples ability to continue to access things that are important parts of their memories gets locked down, the greater the chance that more people will come to see copyright as more of a hindrance than benefit.<p>My son, at 8, still regularly gets upset when he thinks of a fairly inane role playing game he didn&#x27;t spend all that much time on, whose online servers were shut down about two years ago, and has more than once expressed anger towards the developers for doing so.<p>He still has not experienced a &quot;serious&quot; loss in this area in the sense of a game he&#x27;s invested countless hours in and made friendships in. With a culture where more and more time gets spent in these virtual worlds that people invest a lot of time, energy and even money in, if it gets taken away there will be increasing levels of anger as well (if, say, Roblox was to shut down I&#x27;ll never hear the end of it)<p>They&#x27;re going to find themselves threading a fine line here, with new generations likely to be increasingly negative to actions that will be seen not in terms of just shutting down unprofitable games, but as hostile and destructive unjustified attacks on real communities.