In 2021, accessibility advocates got the US Copyright Office to agree to a DMCA exemption that would make it legal for players to break a PC game’s copy protection in order to make it playable for people with disabilities. That decision was quietly reversed this year, all because nobody stepped forward to defend the exemption.
As part of the same ruling that struck down a major game preservation effort back in October, the US Copyright Office also reversed the accessibility exemption it granted in 2021, as Game File (paywalled) reports. DMCA exemptions last for three years, and in order to be extended, somebody has to come forward to advocate for them. Nobody did so for the accessibility exemption.
“Given the constraints of the rulemaking process,” the Copyright Office wrote in its ruling, “because the Office did not receive a petition to renew the current exemption, the Register is not able to recommend its renewal. The Office continues to support enactment of a permanent exemption.” Yes, you’re reading that right – the government wants to make this accessibility exemption permanent. The rules just mean it can’t do so without an external advocate.
The accessibility exemption allows – or rather, allowed – people to bypass copyright protection in order to add features like alternate controller support for PC games in order to help people with disabilities play them. As Game File reports, this was part of a much larger effort from accessibility advocates to be allowed to bypass copyright protection across all kinds of media, hacking in features like audio description for digital movies or more accessible fonts for ebooks. Almost all of the proposed exemptions were struck down – except, specifically, the one for PC games.
“When the narrow exemption came up for renewal in the 2024 cycle, with the available resources we weren’t able to locate anyone who could say that they used the exemption and that they were likely to need it in the future,” Jonathan Band, one of the folks who argued for the broader exemptions in the first place, tells Game File. “This is not to say that it wasn’t used. There just was no efficient way for us to find anyone who had. So, we did not seek renewal. Of course, if anyone does come forward, hopefully it won’t be too hard to convince the Librarian to grant a new exemption.”
The ESA says its members won’t support the one form of game preservation that might actually work.