[game_preservation] support

[Simon Carless]

Brandon J. Van Every wrote:

>Allen R Partridge wrote:
>  
>
>>Anybody got any clues on what
>>if any sort of waivers / permissions we need to move ahead gathering
>>images / sounds / what about code?
>>    
>>
>
>IANAL, but I could swear that the USA's Digital Millenium Copyright Act
>had something in it about being able to emulate or archive works whose
>playback machines are now defunct, meaning they're not manufactured
>anymore or not generally available or whatnot.  Some Googling would
>probably reveal it, I'm too lazy at 5:30 AM to do so.  :-)
>  
>
OK, so I might try to get into this in greater detail (but it's 6.20 AM, 
so the above applies :P), but the Internet Archive (including myself) 
was the entity which successfully argued for the DMCA exemption 
regarding obsolete software:

http://www.archive.org/about/dmca.php

The import thing to note is that copyright laws still apply, so if 
something is under copyright, you still can't make it available for 
public download. However you _are_ allowed to transfer it from, say, 
floppy disc to hard drive, which, believe it or not, wasn't allowed 
under the DMCA (similar type of problem to, say, backing up DVDs.)

We have a _very_ basic Beta version of a 'dark archive' that also 
explains a few more things:

http://www.archive.org/software/clasp.php

However, we really haven't managed to get too far with the 'dark 
archive', both because the scanning/metadata collection is very time 
consuming, and also because it's just not _that_ rewarding to the 
Archive users (our work is generally about free access to material) to 
have a dark archive that they can't access.

This is why we've been working on the afore-mentioned Game Videos Archive:

http://www.archive.org/movies/gamevideos.php

IMHO, this is a great project for the Internet Archive, because we have 
large amounts of space and bandwidth, we can archive things that appear 
elsewhere on the Web but may be badly organized or non permanent, and 
game companies are happy, abstractly, with allowing in-game movies of 
their titles to appear for free download.

Certainly, it's all a grey area, and I am not a lawyer, but in my own 
personal opinion, you should be making available for download items 
which the companies are broadly happy with. This means you should _NOT_ 
make available entire game manuals, actual copies of old software, or 
entire game soundtracks. But you _DO_ seem to be able to make available 
in-game action from games (look at GameSpot's collections of that, for 
example - clearly publishers are fine with that getting out there), 
interpretations of in-game footage (such as machinima), and promotional 
videos which were originally released to showcase the game in the first 
place (since they were distributed to media outlets with the company's 
permissions.)

So, as you can see, when it comes to archiving, there's still a lot you 
can do, but it's _really_ important to keep within areas that the game 
publishers are happy with, or work with them directly (something we need 
to work on.)

Thanks,
s!