Gamers Want DMCA Exemption for ‘Abandoned’ Online Games
I think including abandoned server code is odd, and I'm for it. I think we should start curating more public libraries with games in general, but that's going to be very difficult to do publicly (i.e. in a government library) in today's current online landscape. Between walled garden platforms and API integrations to centralized corporate servers, it seems unlikely that many of today's games will survive in their current state for long. More than ever, games frequently update becoming a different game or die to competition. It'd be rewarding to be able to spin up or join a local [Flavor] World of Warcraft server without getting shut down or told to wait for Blizzard to do it because that specific version of software was abandoned at some point. If it became public domain then, it would be available to the public to operate as we please.<p>I really just look at situations like Halo 2 and think that there's got to be a way to put server code into the public domain so that if someone wants to "rent" Halo 2 server code from the Library so that they can play online on the original hardware and everything, that'd be really cool, and experiences would be able to be shared across generations like books, films, and other forms of art.<p>In the wild, it seems permanent shut down of an online service is equivalent to forfeiting server code for the dead game over to whomever can acquire it, either for sale, or often times theft in form of sharing among the most hardcore followers. This up-for-grabs situation is a symptom of the problem, and shouldn't be the main focus, but it is worth noting because it can affect Copyright/IP protection. If the company behind the game doesn't want to continue supporting a version of their online game, there needs to be a way to gracefully donate said deprecated version without losing underlying IP rights. It's donated and falls into public domain for operation under some relatively clear license a la books in a library. That'd be cool.