The argument against it is founded on copyright.

We fund copyright in order to enrich our culture, by incentivizing creative works.

Blocking creative works preservation strips away the cultural enrichment.

What’s left? People being compelled through taxes to fund profit police for copyright holders who aren’t holding up their end of the bargain.

It’s worth noting that publishers, and especially the “rightsholder groups” that they hire, are not artists. They are parasites. They are paid more than fairly for their role in getting creative works out there in the first place. I can’t think of any reason why they should have continued control after they’ve stopped publishing them.

If a company is going to argue that this would harm potential future re-releases of their games, they should be forced to rerelease those games in less than a years time. Otherwise it can be understood they have no interest in bringing those games back to market.

Allow libraries to do this for games that have no re-release, and have them remove the game from emulation options if it does get a re-release. Simple solution.

This is the situation that the video game history foundation made their famous study, to have as ammunition for their debate in favor for libraries and research and historians. What a sad ending, I hope they find another way in the future.

I think its time for the lawmakers that enable this to retire and move into their windowless and doorless retirement homes in the ground.

Time to do anyway.

Thanks for making things a pain in the ass to find, idiot companies.

Short version I wrote for another news piece but that, to my understanding, should apply for this too:

The text is obtuse and the article’s title and cover are pretty clickbaity, so here’s a tl;dr:
In the US, according to the article, it’s possible to lend multiple forms of digital medias and software as you’d do with physical medias. But when requested to extend this understanding to games too, the US Copyright Office denied the change.

Are there any instances of a 3rd party making digital copies of games available and paying some licensing fee back to the copyright holders? Something akin to how book libraries handle ebooks?

Maybe Steam falls in this category a bit, but I’m thinking something more exhaustive and focused on games that are otherwise out of production.

You see those cheery icons (on the cover image), with its bright colors, full of joy, entertaining and shit? Yeah me neither…

fuck the ESA and the in-the-past-stucking Copyright Office.