Last month, the Copyright Office issued a new ruling that could have a big impact on how libraries, museums, and archives preserve software. But unless you’re enmeshed in the complicated world of game and software copyright policy, it’s a little confusing to unpack, assuming you even heard the news at all!

This week, I stopped by the Video Game History Hour podcast, along with Kendra Albert from the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, to explore what U.S. copyright law means for game preservation! We cover a wide range of topics, from the recent changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, to an obscure part of copyright law called Section 108 and how it applies to video games. Do you know what the Copyright Office’s current definition of a “game” is? It might surprise you!

This is my second time joining Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin on the Video Game History Hour. I love being able to talk about these issues with the gaming community. There’s so much interesting game preservation work that’s happening out-of-view in Zoom meetings and policy groups, and it’s great to shine a light on the effort that goes into these incremental changes that’ll make game and software preservation more accessible.