What a Study on Retro Video Games Can Tell Us About the Precarious Nature of Preserving Our Digital History
Today, Knowledge Rights 21 and CREATe launch the final report in a three-part series that looks at the impact of technological protection measures (TPMs) on research, education and access to culture.
Nearly all digital outputs from the entertainment industries, such as eBooks, journals, film and music are protected by digital locks, which control what users can and cannot do with the content they access. While intended to prevent illegal activities, they often also stand in the way of activities that are central to the mission of libraries. Over the long-term this presents a significant problem for citizens, scholars and knowledge institutions who wish to preserve and access their own digital histories.
Using empirical evidence from a community-led video-game emulator project called MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), this ground-breaking report from Knowledge Rights 21 measures the negative effect of TPMs on preservation of digital cultural heritage. It estimates that for each and every video game requiring circumvention, TPMs added more than 10 months’ worth of extra work. Taking just the 712 games from MAME that required circumvention, this represents 628 years of social costs arising from TPMs. Social costs in this case encompass extra labour on the part of MAME volunteers as well as missing use from unavailability of games locked behind TPMs. Moreover, the study further explains that this is a rather conservative estimate.
Linking these technological challenges with the burdensome and ineffective legal regime for lawful circumvention of TPMs in Europe (outlined in the recently published study by Anthony Rosborough on Technological Protection Measures and the Law – Impacts on Research Education and Preservation), it becomes apparent that an inflexible environment surrounding TPMs not just access to our own digital history, but even its survival at all. This problem is only set to worsen as time passes and there is ever greater reliance on digital services, e.g. SaaS, AIaaS etc.
Not only do delays increase costs for taxpayer-funded organisations and threaten the achievement of the goal of safeguarding the present for the future, they detract from the positive effects that come from cultural preservation. These include, namely, education, research, and the enrichment of the public domain and the creativity that flows from this.
Furthermore, for those objects still protected by TPMs, the report states: “without an accessible working copy, there can be no productive exercise of exceptions, nor can there be research.” Thus, as we see so often in the digital age, poor law-making allows private interests to entirely remove rights that the legislature itself has traditionally deemed important to protect in the interests of society and the economy at large.
Aimed at European policy makers, the report concludes with recommendations that
- The law is clarified to allow cultural heritage institutions to circumvent TPMs for preservation purposes without having to navigate the cumbersome administrative processes currently imposed by European copyright law;
- To weigh the future costs of TPMs against strong protections granted to rightsholders, for example by requiring that rightsholders maintain and offer robust means for European institutions and researchers to access TPM-protected works into the future.
If you would like any further information about the study, please contact us at info@knowledgerights21.org.
17 December 2024
