 Hi, I'm Corey Doctor from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We're at the UCLA Law School, and I'm here with Alex Handy. Alex just gave testimony at the US Copyright Office's Triennial hearing on Exemptions section 12-1 of the DMCA, the DRM law, and Alex works with a museum that preserves video games. So tell us a little bit about what you do. Yes, I'm with the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. I'm the founder and director. We're a mostly volunteer-run organization where we preserve old games in a playable fashion. We have meet-ups, community meet-ups. We have free classes for kids. Our thing is to inspire the next generation of game developers. But in regards to why we're here, we brought back the first virtual world, Habitat. It's now online playable at neohabitat.org. You can play it in a Commodore 64 emulator or a real Commodore 64. You have a wireless card for it. And after working on this game, we sort of discovered, you know, there's some issues that we have to address if we want to continue to preserve virtual worlds. And we also looked around and saw that nobody really is preserving virtual worlds in an institutional fashion. Yeah, so section 12-1 of the DMCA makes it a very fraught business to bypass a copyright law. And you had to, you spent a year and a half negotiating with AOL about whether you could get beyond some billing code for a service that doesn't exist, that doesn't bill anyone, that doesn't whatever. And so you're here to see if you can clear some hurdles in the future. And one of the things that your opposite numbers from the Entertainment Software Alliance was very interested in was your reliance on these kind of looseness communities of volunteers, these like people who are passionate and inspired about games and doing everything they can to bring them back. That, to me, is a very familiar story, right? That's Linux, that's Apache, that's all this other stuff. But for them, it seemed like a really alien idea. Can you talk about the connection between passion and scholarship? Sure, and I think it's understandable that it's a weird thing to grasp because as a concept preservation, you think put it in a box, put it in a room. But when it comes to software preservation, there are lots of individuals out there who are preserving this stuff. There's tons of open-source projects of old games and old server software for games, things like Erklan Masters, Star Control 2, reissued. Our effort with Habitat would not have been able to succeed without the help that we had from Germany, from East Coast, West Coast, North, South, people all over the world because the amount of technical knowledge needed to bring back a massively multiplayer game for the Commodore 64 that ran on Stratus VOS on the server, which we had never even heard of. That amount of technical knowledge is not common. Maybe one person in every state is capable of doing this stuff. It's basically impossible to do this in a room. You need to have a distributive process. We use GitHub, we put the source code for this on GitHub, and we use Slack, and we use chat rooms and email and stuff. We live online for the development process because this is a passion project and these people love this game. Some of these people who are involved in the Habitat project have been waiting for Habitat to come back for 20, 30 years, and as soon as we came back, they want to get right in. But now they're retired and they're in Florida, and they can't come to California and help them work on this. Yeah, they kind of tried to make a vice out of that virtue that they tried to pose this dichotomy that either you want to bring the game back because you love it and you want to play it, or because you want to preserve it so future generations can study it. And I'm like, who wants to preserve things so future generations can study them who aren't passionate and curious and obsessed with those things? Yeah, why can't you be both? If you love that game, you think there's intrinsic value in it, and then other people are going to want to play it. Yeah, and the last thing, at the very end, you had this beautiful and impassioned kind of Mr. Smith goes to Washington Moment about the weird value that you get out of preservation. And can you tell the story of that as odd game you preserved and what you learned from it? Sure, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment was founded in 2011. In 2008, the impetus was that at the Laney College Flea Market and Open, the best video game flea in the world. Undoubtable, can't debate this. I found 57 Bear E-Prom chips, each with handwritten labels. In there were 12 chips labeled CPK Atari. One, two, three, all the way up to 12, with dates. This was the game called Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park for Atari. Silly game, you know, it's actually a port of a game called Athletic Day for the MSX, but we had the revisions of the game. So you could see Ed English and Ed Temple, the authors of the game, taking the original source code of looping, which they took half the source code and that was the basics, which was just literally the stuff to move the memory around. And then you could see the development process as it goes through, right? So when I went to Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam, I could see the floor where they made the paints, the floor where he slept, the floor where all the things that he painted were, like the skulls and stuff. You see the process. This find allows us to see the process of building an Atari 2600 game. If I were to say to you in 1984, Cabbage Patch Kids Adventures in the Park is probably the most important Atari game that was never released. You would say, I was crazy, but now we see why it's important. The future decides what's important from a preservation perspective. We don't get to make that decision. We have no idea what the future is going to want. And so that's why places like archive.org are so important because they save everything. And what we're trying to do is just save the things we think are actually going to be important regardless of what normal people or modern gamers would think, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm reminded of the Rosetta Stone, right? Who would have thought that someone saving an old receipt for some grain would unlock all of antiquity? Right? Like, Asher Bonapal's library is all receipts. Right? Right. It's just nothing but receipts. Sure. Sure. Well, you know, thank you very much for the service you did today. As someone who is married to someone in the games industry, I'm keenly aware of how much of that history has been lost in a very short time. In our lifetimes, games came into existence and now so much of it is unplayable and unusable. And as a writer, you know, I go back and I look at manuscripts that are 1,000 years old and I can read those books. As a gamer, you might struggle to play a game that's 10 years old. And I think the work that you're doing is really important. Well, thank you very much. But we wouldn't be doing it without the EFF. The first exemption was done in conjunction with the EFF in this year. The EFF said, Do you mind doing this? We don't have the time itself. Sure. We were able to take it on. But I mean, they hooked us up with Berkeley. We would not be here without the EFF. And you know, we're suing the US government to invalidate section 12, one of the DMCA. So with any luck, within three years, we won't have to do this again. Yeah, hopefully, we'll be back here if not. All right, we're on. Thank you very much. Thank you. Cheers.