Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grumbel | Hacker News Reader

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> Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them

Share them by bundling them with DRM[1]? Like archive.org does with books and games that you can't download, but only virtually borrow to watch in your browser (trivial to work around, but it's there nonetheless). DRM-free in a word with current Copyright isn't the solution unless you want to wait 90 years to be able to access anything.

> So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible.

Piracy has been preserving games since the dawn of time, so yeah, that'll continue as usual. The games that are hard to preserve are the dynamic ones, the MMORPGs that get updates every week and where large parts of the game are the player communities within it, none of which fits neatly into a DRM-free .zip file.

[1] https://help.archive.org/help/borrowing-from-the-lending-lib...

Your discourse assumes two things: piracy will maintain the archival part without fail and that universal access is the natural end goal. None are true.

Counting on piracy means we will lose stuff. By definition, piracy has adversaries whose job it is to stop it. We cannot count on pirates never to lose any single cultural artifact because their existence is adversarial. Archives and libraries do something legal, they keep culture alive for future generations. Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff. The point of libraries and archives is not to give you web access to every rom with a single click, it's to preserve culture. Access is a bonus, not the point. That's why most of a museum's collection is in their vault. What Archive.org is doing is with their collection is a compromise, and is actually criticized by many other archives who see their adversarial stance with copyright owners as detrimental to the mission of preservation.

> Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff.

That's a little more than a trade off, it means nobody alive today will ever experience those games. And those people 90 years in the future, probably won't care. There is no culture kept alive here, burring it all in a landfill would do just the same.

DRM-free by itself really doesn't help here. DRM-free ala GOG doesn't even allow used sales, as your game ownership is still tied to an account and can't be relinquished or transferred. And buying DRM-free games from random people without ownership track record, ain't exactly a desired good to begin with.

As far as I know, there is no used marked for DRM-free games.

You need a proper copyright reform to actually addresses all of this. Or step outside the law and go the pirate route, which actually keeps old games alive and playable.

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