Entertainment Software Association vs. Videogame Preservation: End of SNES, Sega Genesis Roms?

The Entertainment Software Association is here to say that they don't want anyone restoring older video games who have long since been abandoned by their publishers. According to them, this is on par with hacking and Internet piracy. It looks like the long-standing war on older SNES, Sega Genesis and Gameboy roms and emulators will continue.

Law student Kendra Albert is fighting this claim by the ESA and wants to give legal protection to game enthusiasts, museums and academics who wish to preserve the games they loved whether it be for pleasure, studious efforts or simply passing it down. Section 1201, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, gives anybody looking to do this a problem as it shuts down any server with classic games that is deemed to have broken copyright laws.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says Section 1201 is not here to protect the sanctity of development creativity, but instead it's used by entertainment industries to "control markets" and "lock out potential competition." They also say the ESA's hacking gripe is bogus because hacking in itself has transformed the gaming industry in big ways.

"Most of the programmers that create games for Sony, Microsoft, EA, Nintendo, and other ESA members undoubtedly learned their craft by tinkering with existing software," the EFF blog says. "If 'hacking,' broadly defined, were actually illegal, there likely would have been no video game industry."

 #throwbackthursday #tbt #Repost @pete_aeiko.
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A few little gems and classics from the #Snes collection #nintendo

A photo posted by @nintendo on Apr 9, 2015 at 11:32am PDT

The ESA still sticks by its claim that hacking will "undermine the fundamental copyright principles on which our copyright laws are based."

The EFF hopes that the Copyright Office steps in to revamp Section 1201's anti-circumvention provisions in a way that lets researchers study video games from a cultural and historical perspective. This would greatly benefit a deep gaming Internet archive like Oakland, California's Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment without it being torn down by the DMCA.