I mean, okay. But it’s not really the ESA’s responsibility to archive art and cultural works for posterity. They’re going to care about whether it’s going to affect their bottom line and if the answer is “yes”, then they probably aren’t going to support it. Why ask them?
There was a point in time in the US when a work was only protected by copyright if one deposited such a work with the Library of Congress. That might be excessive, but it could theoretically be done with video games. Maybe only ones that sell more than N copies.
Legal deposit is a legal requirement that a person or group submit copies of their publications to a repository, usually a library. The number of copies required varies from country to country. Typically, the national library is the primary repository of these copies. In some countries there is also a legal deposit requirement placed on the government, and it is required to send copies of documents to publicly accessible libraries.
I agree it shouldn’t be the ESA’s responsibility. However as it says in the article:
In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation revealed 87 percent of games released pre-2010 were currently not preserved in any capacity. Attempts previously made by the Library of Congress were halted by the ESA, which said it’d rely on publishers to take care of those efforts themselves.
So the ESA have made themselves the problem by halting such attempts
It’s still circular. The ESA doesn’t run the Library of Congress. They can argue that the LoC shouldn’t do that, but they don’t have decision-making authority in that.
mandate it with full source code to participate in copyright related lawsuits of the work, and mandate all materials get posted online after the work enters public domain
I mean, okay. But it’s not really the ESA’s responsibility to archive art and cultural works for posterity. They’re going to care about whether it’s going to affect their bottom line and if the answer is “yes”, then they probably aren’t going to support it. Why ask them?
There was a point in time in the US when a work was only protected by copyright if one deposited such a work with the Library of Congress. That might be excessive, but it could theoretically be done with video games. Maybe only ones that sell more than N copies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
I agree it shouldn’t be the ESA’s responsibility. However as it says in the article:
So the ESA have made themselves the problem by halting such attempts
It’s still circular. The ESA doesn’t run the Library of Congress. They can argue that the LoC shouldn’t do that, but they don’t have decision-making authority in that.
mandate it with full source code to participate in copyright related lawsuits of the work, and mandate all materials get posted online after the work enters public domain