While playing the original versions of classic games on aging original hardware can sometimes be difficult, it's at least typically possible. That's not the case for many online games, which are functionally inoperable once the developer or publisher decides to shut down the official servers that provide the only way for players to communicate with each other. Unofficial hobbyist projects that try to create new servers for these abandoned games could run afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its ban on "the circumvention of access control technologies."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants to change that. In an official exemption request (PDF) filed with the Library of Congress this week, the nonprofit advocacy group asks that users be allowed to modify access controls and online authentication checks in legally obtained games "when the [game] servers authorized by the developer are permanently shut down." In this way, those users can access third-party servers in order to regain "core functionality" that is no longer available through the defunct official servers.

The EFF gives the specific example of Nintendo'sgames, which used a proprietary protocol to communicate with Nintendo's servers before Nintendo shut those servers down for the Wii and DS . Reverse-engineering that protocol could be considered "circumvention" in the DMCA's current broad prohibitions, as could modifying the game's code to allow for connection to new, non-Nintendo servers.

The EFF's requested exemption would also apply to single-player games that have to "phone home" to since-dead authentication servers to confirm an activation key, making them unplayable without modification. The group carves out space for restrictions on massively multiplayer games, though, saying the exemption should not apply to "'persistent worlds,' in which the game’s audiovisual content is primarily stored on the developer’s server and not in the client."

As the law stands now, "archivists, historians, and other academic researchers who preserve and study videogames are currently inhibited by legal uncertainty," the EFF argues. "The computer programs described above are used for continued play, study, and to preserve them in a usable state for future generations... The threat of liability inhibits the archiving and preservation community, in both its formal and informal guises."

But the EFF says this exemption is important for regular gamers as well, to prevent them from losing access to online features or even entire games as servers go offline. "Already, authentication servers for some products using the always-online single player model have shut down, suggesting an uncertain future for these games," the EFF points out. The organization noted that the accelerating transition to digital sales will only increase this in the future.

In a perfect world, it would be nice if game makers took the trouble to add their own open, non-proprietary server support that could be activated once the "official" servers are offline. Since that seems unlikely to happen, though, the least the Library of Congress could do is allow for the community of researchers and fans to add this functionality after a game's original maker can't be bothered to offer continuing support.