The Video Game History Foundation says it is "disappointed" by the US Copyright Office's refusal to grant a new Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemption to help support videogame preservation, saying the game industry's resistance to the proposed change "forces researchers to explore extra-legal methods to access the vast majority of out-of-print video games."
The VGHF has been working with the Software Preservation Network on a petition for a change to DMCA regulations that would allow libraries and archives to remotely share access to "out of print" games in their collections. "Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers," VGHF said.
