Ars Technica offers a fascinating interview with Preserving Virtual Worlds project coordinator, Jerome McDonough, detailing how the group will archive a dozen or so classic videogames including Doom, multiple Warcraft titles, and the MIT-developed 1962 classic Spacewar! The project, which is being spearheaded by librarians at the University of Illinois, hopes to archive these and other classics for posterity... but apparently not for consumpition. The group is headed by McDonough, who is also Assistant Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois.
There are some interesting questions in the interview, like why the project is called "Preserving Virtual Worlds" when most of the games, save Second Life, aren't really virtual worlds as gamers have come to define them. There's also a fair bit of discussion on taking on a project under the constraints of copyright law and the DMCA. The one thing that readers may find disheartening is that even though the group is archiving these games, they probably won't be playable by the masses. That's because they are being "dark archived" - meaning archived but not available to be played or used for the "length of the copyright." This was a trade off to some publishers who were not willing to give such broads rights to IPs.
But the most interesting part of the project relates to Second Life; McDonough says that this game offers a unique archiving challenge because it has to get permission from rights holders. If you're not familiar with Second Life, users that create things in the game are the copyright holders. That means that every rights holder had to be contacted in order to archive the game.
Read it in its entirety here.
Comments
Re: Inside Preserving Virtual Worlds
If tax money is in use...can you say slush fund?
I have a dream, break the chains of copy right oppression! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/cigital-disobedience/
I have a dream, break the chains of copy right oppression! http://zippydsmlee.wordpress.com/2011/12/31/what-is-cigital-disobedience/
Re: Inside Preserving Virtual Worlds
But Doom is shareware. The entire first episode is freely available -- and of course, since Doom has long been open-source, it's easy to get it in a format playable on modern systems.
So presumably it's just the last two episodes, and Doom II, that are being sealed until their copyright expires.
Re: Inside Preserving Virtual Worlds
I think it will come down to if they have the resources to have two differnt tracks AND research the lisence differnces of indivdual titles AND indemify their funders from lawsuits (since even if one has no case, they can still sue and drain the resources of a library).
Meaning they will probably stick with the archiving alone. Though I could potentially see them setting up some type of in-library system for accessing the games since that falls squarly into classic library functionality.
Re: Inside Preserving Virtual Worlds
Heh, figures, IP holders want some of it locked up so ALL of it gets locked up.
Most of us know for a fact that it's not due to copyright violations, they just don't want us havign access without paying.