The Entertainment Software Association is trying to crack down on academic and archive projects restoring old games to a playable state, claiming it's promoting illegal hacking of video games without publisher authorization.

Even though there's a large community involved in the process of filing and researching old games, ESA and several other copyright and legislative bodies have come forward to condemn organizations like California's Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment and the Internet Archive.

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ESA is using Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to authorize the ban on illegal modification of original titles without publisher consent, even if the publisher is no longer actively using the IP or selling the video game.

Section 1201 bans the modification of video games by communities, museums, researchers and archives. For online games, that might mean going completely off the grid, even if active communities still want to revive the servers.

"Thanks to server shutdowns, and legal uncertainty created by Section 1201, their objects of study and preservation may be reduced to the digital equivalent of crumbling papyrus in as little as a year," Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Mitch Stoltz wrote. "That's why an exemption from the Copyright Office is needed."

EFF is asking for academics, museums and archives to have special privileges to modify older titles when servers go offline to preserve the art of older titles. It follows the Internet Archives recently launched Historical Software Collection, featuring 2,400 MS-DOS video games from way back when.

Community projects to revive games have lead to their resurgence in popularity in some cases, allowing fans of the video game to relive the glory days. Publishers like Double Fine and Square Enix are also offering their own remastered versions of classic games to keep audiences interested.

That said, some publishers tend to take offense when community projects revive games and don't properly offer credit or revenue. For academic and archive projects, however, there is no revenue to be made since the pursuit is purely educational or preservation.

Hopefully the move to change the rules will allow academics and fans of video games to continue preserving old titles, since there is plenty of other media allowed to be customized by organizations not looking to generate commercial appeal.

TagsESA, DMCA, Internet Archive, MS-DOS, EFF