Copyright and Games Preservation: Lessons and Opportunities in De-colonization

This extended abstract examines how copyright law and institutional preservation practices struggle to accommodate video games in a global, post-colonial context. Its central argument is that both copyright frameworks and heritage institutions were designed around static, physical, territorially bounded objects, and that digital games, which require ongoing copies, updates, and platform maintenance, expose these limitations. The authors argue that the de-colonization debates reshaping museums and intangible cultural heritage policy offer a useful parallel for rethinking how digital assets such as games should be owned, accessed, and preserved.

The paper identifies several concrete problems. Digital distribution and "service" business models mean that libraries and archives often hold only licenses rather than ownership, limiting their long-term preservation capacity. Territorial licensing produces uneven global availability: the authors cite Sony's PlayStation Network requirements, which restrict access to roughly 85 countries, and a study finding that only a small fraction of games released since the 1970s remain commercially available. Attention and resources for game history are also concentrated in the Global North, leaving the play experiences of the global majority underrepresented. The authors note that technological protection measures and recent US DMCA exemption rulemaking further complicate lawful preservation.

The research is explicitly presented as preliminary, with the authors calling for further work on the global state of game preservation, the supportiveness of national legislation, and ethnographic study of player and researcher practices. Rather than offering empirical findings or a survey-based dataset, the paper raises research questions about access inequities, the representation of non-Western voices in game scholarship, and how cultural heritage practice and copyright law might together meet the physical preservation needs of games.