Games That Weren't: Preserving Cancelled and Unreleased Video Game History

And to be able to preserve released Video Games, please go support the Stop Killing Games [1] movement and sign the European Citizen's initiative [2] if you're an EU citizen. There is 1 month left to bring the subject to a discussion, and 500k signatures are missing.

[1] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

[2] https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

I think all art and media should be preserved. It's been clear for decades current copyright laws aren't fit for purpose. Fair use within books is for collection so it should be for digital.

What do copyright laws (which, don't get me wrong, have a whole kettle of issues for sure) have to do with this?

DRM is just a thing that authors choose to put into their media. The fact that they do it because enforcing copyright via legal channels is unrealistic is effectively incidental.

If anything, what is necessary to achieve the objective is putting limits on what authors are allowed to put inside of the media they are producing, which is a heck of a can of worms in of itself that I think zealous preservation advocates are a bit too eager to brush off.

That's true, but IIRC Stop Killing Games goes a bit further and aims for things like the release of server code when the servers get shut down.

Maybe I don't grasp the full picture, but the amount of patent trolls and media companies constantly attacking the Internet Archive should be enough to empirically prove that our current laws do a terrible job at ensuring media is preserved.

Not necessarily source code, but anything that would keep the game in a playable state after end of life. So any one of:

- a) patch to game the game playable in single-player mode locally

- b) binaries to self-host a server

would satisfy that requirement.

Note that the details of implementations of any law that would advance the cause are still to be discussed, which is the whole point of the petition.

More on what would be expected and some example use-cases are available in the FAQ of the Stop Killing Games official web-page: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

While the legality of data preservation/sharing is a whole can of worms in itself, Stop Killing Games would at least address the technical hurdles of even being able to run the game after its end of life.

With always-on-DRMs, server-based multiplayer service games, and even things like exclusive streaming-only video games, even having access to the data required to run what you purchased can be literally impossible.

> I think all art and media should be preserved

Completely agree with you, and so does Ross Scott, the principal proponent of the Stop Killing Games movement.

Unfortunately "Video Games are art" is still too controversial of a take so the focus is currently on the customer protection angle, as the road for this argument is already paved by existing EU legislature.

> What do copyright laws [...] have to do with [...] DRM

Ask the people who signed off on DMCA/EUCD.

They allow companies a legal right to attack those who host for archival purposes. This makes it hard for people such as the internet archive to carry on. Archiving and collecting digital works of art and therefore the code behind it, should have the same as physical works.

DRM is a whole different kettle of fish that I agree also needs to be solved with all media forms.

Yup, signed the initiative.