Preservation Rocks!

In honor of the Blackout today, I'm highlighting exactly the kind of site that could unnecessarily be a target of the SOPA legislation: the OSR Conservation Project.

From the site:

OSR Conservation Process

We are here to keep your free games freely available. Forever.

The intent and purpose of the OSR Conservation Process is to keep free valuable gaming artefacts permanently available. Gamers worldwide can ill afford losing legal access to useful game material: the so-called "OSR movement" was born out of retroclones written by enthusiastic people putting in a stupid amount of effort using the Open Gaming Licence.

This material, unless properly licenced, would be lost if right holders stopped distributing it, for example due to data loss or untraceable copyrights. One of the main reasons is the virality of the Open Gaming Licence, which prevents cross-licencing of products with other, more open, licences.

Using really simple words, you give us permission to distribute your free games, and we'll take care of it.

Forever

Well, at least we'll try to: the submitted files are immediately backed-up offsite and, after a period of grace (mostly to give time to users to catch improper uploads) the files will be bundled and distributed as both torrents and downloadable archives. We also plan to make available a virtual machine image of the OCP so, in case both our volunteers and servers die in a fire or something and the cleric didn't show up for the session, the next party of adventurers will be able to continue with the quest to keep free games freely available.