Video game preservation in France: legal deposit, a model to extend

The IGN article "How Stop Killing Games Ups the Ante in the Fight for Video Game Preservation" recalls the urgency of preserving video games. Yet France already has, in this field, an old and remarkable tool: legal deposit.

A principle nearly five centuries old

Legal deposit was established in France by the Ordinance of Montpellier of François Ier, in 1537. Modernised by Law No. 92-546 of 20 June 1992 (today codified in Articles L.131-1 and following of the Heritage Code), it guarantees the preservation of works produced or distributed in France, for future generations.

The 1992 law does not explicitly mention video games, but these are included as multimedia documents and software. It is the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) that is tasked with collecting and preserving them.

What about the digital form?

An important point, still little known: preservation assumes that the BnF can effectively access the deposited content. French law also provides that technical protection measures (DRM) must not obstruct the benefit of the legal deposit exception; the practical arrangements (provision of the means of access, removal of protections) nonetheless remain to be specified on a case-by-case basis.

This is a valuable but incomplete foundation: it relies largely on the cooperation of publishers and does not guarantee that the game remains playable, only that it is archived.

A model to bring to the European level

Extending this logic to the scale of the Union, an obligation to deposit video game works, access for heritage institutions, end-of-life obligations for online games, would make French-style legal deposit a foundation for a genuine European preservation policy. The debate connects with the one on the notion of "intellectual property" in video games.

Sources: Heritage Code, art. L.131-1 et seq. · Clubic · HAL-SHS · SNE, legal deposit.

Official references

• BnF, legal deposit of sound, video and multimedia collections
• BnF, video games at the BnF
• Directive (EU) 2019/790, copyright in the digital single market (EUR-Lex)
• Heritage Code, art. L.131-1 et seq. (legal deposit)