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DMCA exemptions - single player games

kat · 4 · 15372

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Offline kat

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US Congress & the United States Copyright Office have made an amendment to Title 17 (Copyright Act) to now account for a number of specific exemptions to DMCA - "Section 1201 Exemptions to Prohibition Against Circumvention of Technological Measures Protecting Copyrighted Works". Included is an exemption for computer games for which authentication servers have been inactive for a given period of time;
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(8)(i) Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable local gameplay, solely for the purpose of: [source pg. 20 (PDF)]



Offline kat

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Lets say you cracked Return to Castle Wolfenstein so you could play through Single Player. If you did that solely because the authorising server was no longer available (id software/Activision had shut the authentication service down), the exemption recognises that under those circumstances game owners have lawful "permitted access" to play games they own (purchased/obtained legally), ostensibly single player and multi-player over LAN (although this latter part is not so clear), without fear of prosecution for breaking/finding ways around DRM protections/negating the authentication service (which would normally result in DMCA Take-down or other prosecutory Notice).

Whilst this 'permits' game owners in theory 'cracking' abandoned games to play them, it's not so clear how the distribution of tools and/or information that facilitate that would be effected by the change in legislation because doing so could be seen as effects to provide infringing services for other content, so the modification only exempts activities at the individual level when a person is essentially sat in front of a computer about to play a previous locked game.


Offline ratty redemption

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understood, thanks kat. and that's surprisingly good news.