The United States Library of Congress has added new regulations to US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) wherein it has ruled that legitimate game owners can modify authentication servers which are no longer operational and get their old games running again.
Most of the games today require server authentication even if you want to play the single-player mode, let alone the multiplayer mode. When these servers are shut down, game lovers – be it historians or consumers – tend to explore illegal means and try to redirect the game to access third party authentication servers or simply remove the authentication process entirely.
With this ruling – one can bring back games which are no longer supported by the publishers, but does not allow legitimising full online game servers to online multiplayer games – whose official servers have been taken down. Preservationist, Historians, Libraries or Museums can even hack the consoles themselves, if necessary. A separate decision to renew a previous exemption for jailbreaking iPhones, other mobile devices and other wearable devices was also granted.
More reforms were announced which permit one to bypass the access restrictions to fix and modify cars, without having you to modify the entertainment system or telematics software. One also has to wait for a year after the regulation takes effect to get cracking.
With this law in place one is less likely to flout the law while tinkering with the devices and software you paid for. The law is currently applicable only in USA and does not apply to products and softwares which are not directly under the US law. So games under the purview of European Union or Asian laws cannot be bypassed.