The Electronic Frontier Foundation announces they are proposing an exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow circumventing game Digital Rights Management to allow continued access to "abandoned" games (thanks Slashdot via Ant). Here's part of the discussion of this:

Section 1201 also has chilling effects on people who want to preserve or archive games, both those who are affiliated with formal institutions and those who are just enthusiasts. As digital archiving expert Henry Lowood explains, “Repositories and researchers [are forced] into the uncomfortable situation of considering unauthorized circumvention of copyright law in order to preserve or provide access to game and virtual world environments, data, and software.” Archiving and preserving playable copies is essential to future researchers, especially ones who wish to study the multiplayer components and the design of modern games. In the words of game community sociologist T.L. Taylor, “playing together is not a trivial side aspect to digital gaming and this means that scholars need to be able to emulate conditions of original use as much as possible.”

The exemption that we proposed covers games where single-player or multiplayer play is no longer possible, either because the game’s developers have shut down servers or abandoned them. (It does not cover massively multiplayer online games with persistent worlds.) Experts from the Internet Archive, Stanford University, MIT, and the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment filed statements in support of the exemption.

We think Section 1201 is an unsound, overbroad statute that chills huge amounts of legal reverse-engineering. And it allows companies to maintain a chokehold on their works even after they give up on the communities that love them. It shouldn’t exist. But since it does, we ask the Library of Congress to grant an exemption to help enthusiasts of all types continue to play and preserve the games they lawfully own.