Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.
Fair use is already pretty good, but we shouldn't need to rely on it to preserve older games. The reform we need is a dramatically shorter term for copyrights. All older games should be completely out of copyright.
I wish, but shortening existing copyright terms would be legally very thorny. It would run into Takings Clause challenges and violate treaties the US has signed.
Oh don’t worry. If the US can bail on the treaty signed with Ukraine and repeatedly threaten to not honor NATO commitments, then this is small-fry stuff.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
Yes, obviously, that's why terms have been extended so far. My point is that, for the same reason, existing legal structures make this much harder to undo than to do.
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
This administration would just say that it is in the national security interest of the US to do the thing. Judges are wary to restrict the POTUS prerogatives relating to national defense, so they won't challenge it.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
I'd add better handling of copy-protected titles as well. If a game wants the benefit of copyright, they need to make a version of it without DRM available in escrow (held by some entity like the Library of Congress) for when the copyright expires.
One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
This seems tough-to-unworkable for some games. I'll use World of Warcraft^1 as an example.
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
Your complaint is probably moot foot dragging. Companies aren't held liable for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time they released a product.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.
I hope there's an indie carveout or something for less than like 200k revenue.
And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.
I really want copyright to stay the hell out of the way of just letting players reverse engineer old games, but it's an international thing at this point
We have a right to own our videogame, there is absolutely no necessity to have an exclusion, make the server open source if you want to shutdown the server
that seems silly, I'm not supposed to be able to rent an apartment or a movie? There should be transparency of course and no misleading labeling but I see no reason why people should be prevented from transacting money for whatever arrangement they please
Either way: even if it's never put to a vote, having the bill as a basis to build on for the next House will be something, at least. Better than nothing (which we are increasingly getting used to).
Personally, this bill makes me want to buy games more. I would likely pirate things much, much, more if everything's "licensed" even if I buy it. I agree with the bill because everyone wins except for the capitalists that want us all permanently renting.
A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.
At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches
> I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
Why is this an existential issue? Every game that could be played, on all platforms, from all studios, for decades, met this requirement because they could be played offline right out of the box.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.
It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.
And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use.
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
AI or not: the main idea here is that future developed games under such policy would already be built to go offline/p2p at a moment's notice. It's relatively easy to make the switch if you build for it (or if your engine has tools to support it).
>A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Banktupcy at this scale simply means ownership of the IP and game changes to someone else. So they'd be on the hook if they want to operate in any jurisdiction with such a law.
They don't have to do anything. They just need to stay the hell out of our way. They don't even need to release anything, we'll do it all ourselves at zero cost to them. Just don't bother us with idiotic lawyer nonsense, that's literally the only thing they have to do.
Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
The people who really ruined for everyone else are the hipsters that supported coffee machines connected 24/7 to the internet and wouldn't function unless you paid a monthly subscription.
Games were licensed long before Steam. Heck, I remember buying a game in the early 1990's that would disable use of the floppies once it was installed to the hard drive. By the time Steam rolled around, registration keys with online verification were normalized.
I don't think you know what 'hipster' is, and no, there is not some group that did the wifi coffee machines, and if there were, that would not have changed anything.
I don't think it was ever the case that games which could theoretically be redistributed were unprofitable. It's more that locking everyone into a subscription or renting-as-buying for everything just happens to be more profitable. That's true for just about anything ever in the world, it just so happens that the game, film, and music industries were able to actually pull it off. Other industries suffered from problems of bad public opinion, but the frog is being boiled as we speak, just take a look at the car industry for example.
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
The law is how you increase the cost. Every law has a punishment for breaking it.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.
I'm so sick of people getting downvoted for telling the truth that people don't like. HN, do better. If you want an infinite warm hug where we lie to each other and pretend that utopia and magical rainbow unicorns for all is right around the corner, please go somewhere else, or please please manage to suppress these urges for long enough to maintain HN as the science and logic based community it once was. Or crash and burn in a hopium-fueled echochamber that benefit no one, what do I care. shrug
Are you saying you think it's not economically viable to build and sell games that work offline and can be bought used? If so, how did the gaming industry survive and continue growing for several decades from the 1980s through the 2010s?
I didn't downvote, but I read the comment and simply thought in my head "so piracy should have tanked the market 25 years ago, in the Limewire age huh?"
History's disproven the notion that easy copying means constantly depreciating prices. The premise is flawed unless something so fundamentally different about piracy in 2026 is happening compared to 2000.
not that has stopped the US doing something.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
We already have reverse engineering tools, and the vast majority of 20 year old media isn't producing new revenue.
Will never ever happen. Disney alone would spend billions to stop any meaningful copyright reforms
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.
I really want copyright to stay the hell out of the way of just letting players reverse engineer old games, but it's an international thing at this point
We have a right to own our videogame, there is absolutely no necessity to have an exclusion, make the server open source if you want to shutdown the server
This is a common excuse publishers use to yank games, so if you do this the bill would be crippled.
if people can buy the game with ownership, then how does subscription like software adobe is exist ?????
along with everything else introduced that doesn’t go up for vote yet
Either way: even if it's never put to a vote, having the bill as a basis to build on for the next House will be something, at least. Better than nothing (which we are increasingly getting used to).
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
>A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Banktupcy at this scale simply means ownership of the IP and game changes to someone else. So they'd be on the hook if they want to operate in any jurisdiction with such a law.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
FYI the IoT wave was firmly industry driven.
Do you think it's possible we could simply sell physical copies on physical media and deal with the necessity to build new products every so often?
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.
History's disproven the notion that easy copying means constantly depreciating prices. The premise is flawed unless something so fundamentally different about piracy in 2026 is happening compared to 2000.