You can Legally Ignore DRM On Single-Player Games Now

DRM has always been a problem often discussed in the gaming world, but just as troublesome but examined infinitely less is copyright law. Now, Copyright law is necessary and good, but it has been twisted and distorted by greedy IP owners into becoming something much more insidious. What was once the ability for creators to protect their creations has been changed to a way for giant companies to enforce their will, ranging from anything between stopping fan projects to taking down youtube videos.

Copyright is also what prevents much of gaming history from being archived--companies have the rights to these older games for a very long time, well beyond their ability to care about them, and the amount of work and money it would take to preserve and archive them the way we preserve and archive books and movies simply isn’t a prerogative. So we’re going to lose a lot of our history if we don’t act fast, but fortunately, it appears as if we’ve won a small victory in that particular battlefield.

See, when a company stops supporting a game, particularly a multiplayer game, the only way to keep playing it is to either break the DRM and the copyright law that protects it, or to hack it. Both of which are illegal. However, the US Copyright Office has recently reviewed the copyright laws that bind both civilians and cooperations, and have recently come to the conclusion that this simply will not do, and have thus come to two benevolent decisions:

• DRM on single-player games that are no longer supported by companies can legally be circumvented. That does not apply to multiplayer games, however.
• Libraries, museums, and archives are now able to ‘jailbreak’ consoles themselves, removing all limiting software and enabling the consoles to act as mere gaming devices. This, of course, does not apply to the average consumer, but allowing these places to remove all that crap and preserve the games these consoles were made to play is a huge win for us historians.

Now, some would argue that as nice as these are, it’s simply not enough--especially since most ‘archiving’ of games happens via emulators, which companies crack down on mercilessly. The good news is that every three years, the US Copyright Office revisits the laws and can take these things one step forward again, giving us more rights. The downside, sadly, is that same process can also remove these rights, meaning in theory we could take a step backwards again.

Let’s hope, however, it doesn’t come down to that.