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. Fifa coins "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, http://www.fifa14cup.com/ 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.