Oh yes! The U.S. Copyright Office has granted the much sought after exemption to the DMCA which allows for the preservation of online only games that are no longer available for play.
Back in 2017, various groups petitioned the office to grant this exception to cover online only games (such as MMO’s) which required an online server (there was already exemptions in place which allowed for the preserving of games that previously used an online “phone home” check. That did not cover the circumvention of the access controls used for MMO’s though which rely on client/server technology to operate.
The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) unsurprisingly opposed the petitioning of this exemption for sunset games earlier this year.
This exemption now allows archivists, museums, and video game preservationists to legally file for the exemption (must meet all the conditions specified) in order to create the backend server side emulation (private server) for games that are no longer online (since it is highly unlikely that the companies which own the intellectual property, will simply fork over their source code or even server binaries). Unfortunately, this also isn’t a magic bullet of getting MMO’s that no one had logged data for while it was running, back again in even a fraction of their original state.
This still is great news though given how many online only games are becoming a part of our culture where they are being lost forever.
