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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.