[game_preservation] Kickstarting the IGDA Preservation SIG

[Kieron Wilkinson]

Hedwig Lodrigo wrote:

> I just follow press releases and when I see a free game pop up I go for 

> it. Or sometimes people send me a mail with a legally free game. Also 

> most files are not being hosted on the remain in play website itself. So 

> from a preservation point of view this is not a good thing. This has 


I assume that you keep a copy of them, so this is probably not an issue
unless the copyright owner decides to pull them from their own site...


> multiple reasons, the first is some games are free to play but only the 

> copyright owner can distribute it. Mostly this is done as a way of PR 

> stunt. I'm not a lawyer and figuring out all the small ins and out of 

> each license is probably above my head. So it's just easier to link to 

> the page where the official download is. The second reason is pure 


This makes sense. One of the plans we had at SPS is to get exactly these
licenses. We only have obtained licenses for a few games (for both
archival and distribution), but we did not really push forward with it.
I think we made a point of making the licenses we have transferable to
our partners too, so can probably be used for the SIG without bothering
the copyright holders again.

If we could make this a spear point of the SIG I'm sure we could get
a favourable response. Maybe we can even approach games companies
via their IGDA members. But to see how receptive the copyright holders
are, we are simply just going to have to try it and see.

Hopefully the Internet Archive can help us with any archival and
distribution, since they are pretty experienced doing this. :)

If copyright holders wish to be the lone distributor of the games, then
then it reverts to the classic preservation problem of archival (almost
certainly easier getting a license for). Maybe it is a bit early to be
discussing the following issue in detail just yet, but I'll mention it
quickly anyway...

IANAL, so anyone please correct me if I have any of this wrong.

I see two avenues for legal preservation.

   1) Getting an explicit license to archive games from the copyright
holders.
   2) Owning a copy of the game itself.

Getting licenses for archival would be great, but the problem we have is
with all those games where (1) the copyright owner is not interested in
preservation for whatever reason, (2) the copyright owner is not
contactable, and (3) the copyright owner is not really known. I don't
mean just unknown by the public, I also mean unknown by the developers
and the publisher too - and unfortunately if they no longer have copies
of their contracts it is a bit of a show stopper. See next point.

Owning a copy of the game itself is good enough for archival in most
countries. The problem arises with our syndicate of different entities
here in the SIG. We could just say that those projects which own
physical copies of the games should be responsible for archiving them,
which is okay as a starting point, but this is not a very stable or
"safe" solution. What we really need to do is get a central body like
the Internet Archive to do the archiving for us.

I really don't know how that is going to work out legally. I am keenly
following all the recent developments of digital libraries for books,
and the legal challenge against Google. Perhaps this will make things
slightly more clear for us, though I guess things are slightly different
because Google is making those copyrighted texts partly available, where
our initial goal should be to get the games safely archived, privately,
or at least initially until we can get distribution licenses. The other
way is to wait until the copyright expires (though unless the law
changes for the better, we will probably all be dead by then - I guess
mainly because of that annoying mouse).

In summary I guess the question is, can we archive (not distribute!)
copyrighted works on behalf of a separate but associated entity? I think
there was some discussion of this before... Was there any resolution to it?

-- 
Kieron Wilkinson
IGDA Preservation SIG