Electronic Frontier Foundation

Imagine that your car’s starter had to call the manufacturer every time you tried to turn the car on. What would happen if that manufacturer no longer existed? No more car.

When an online game loses official support, that is often exactly what happens to the game. Many games, even those that are not played online, use DRM called authentication servers to prevent illicit use—which of course prevents any use when the developer ceases support.

But the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to change that by altering copyright law to allow users to legally modify old abandoned games to remove obsolete DRM.

The EFF is a nonprofit organization founded in 1990 that advocates “user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development.”

In a press release, the EFF announced that it had filed several exemption requests with the U.S. Copyright Office, all aimed at giving consumers more freedom in how they can modify or repair their property. One exemption, for example, would allow users to access software in their cars to make it easier for them to repair their vehicles on their own.

EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry said:

The DMCA was supposed to help protect against copyright infringement, but it’s been abused to interfere with all kinds of lawful activities that have nothing to do with infringement. Software is in all kinds of devices, from cars to coffee-makers to alarm clocks. If that software is locked down by DRM, it’s likely that you can’t tinker, repair, and re-use those objects without incurring legal risk.

If approved, the abandoned game exemption would allow users to reverse engineer and modify old games that have lost support. For example, games could be modified to no longer attempt to connect to an authentication server.

This would be good news for the hundreds of games that use online authentication, many of which are already unusable, either because developers have ceased support or because the developer itself no longer exists.