Copyright Access Exemption Granted for Obsolete Videogames

In response to a filing by Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive, Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons, and others, the Librarian of Congress granted access exemptions from copyright protection measures in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to obsolete videogames. The exemption applies to games that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, and it determines a format obsolete “if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.”

According to the original filing, the exemption was proposed in order to migrate degraded and obsolete works to modern storage systems, and enable “archiving, future scholarship, and commentary.”