Roms, Are Any Considered Public Domain Options

[3RA1N1AC]

www.copyright.gov.htm

I rest my case...

Jackerl

it doesn't hurt to familiarize oneself with the "fair use" doctrine, as well.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

now that we're in the electronic age, it's probably time for legal definitions pertaining to "libraries" to be updated. for example, is borrowing a CD from a city/county's public library much different from downloading mp3s, listening to 'um for a little while and then deleting them? would it be illegal for a library to purchase arcade motherboards, back them up, and make them available to play on emulators?... might sound like a funny idea at first, yet "mainstream" society is starting to accept video games as being akin to interactive literature or interactive cinema. and so forth. these are the sorts of questions which may someday have to be answered by judges, as "soft" electronic storage & transmission replaces old-fashioned ink & paper, magnetic tape and optical discs.

more to the original question: most electronic games' copyrights are still in effect, they will not expire for many years... BUT the ownership of many games' copyrights are either unknown or subject to dispute as companies sometimes go out of business and no one bothers to purchase their assets (copyrights & trademarks), or the people who've inherited the assets have no interest in continuing to market & protect them.

this is an important idea that would be used in defense of an emulator such as MAME... the idea that the emulator is largely intended to preserve the functionality of ROMs that have (for all intents & purposes) been abandoned, and that many ROMs are what you might call "abandonware." even if MAME's developers were to remove support for all of the titles that are still being recycled commercially in "arcade hits" compilations, there'd still be a huge list of games which would otherwise be completely lost and forgotten if not for emulation.

as for how all of that holds up in court, it's all very much a grey area as previously stated. one might think "the law is the law is the law" and that's the end of that, but it really depends largely on the particular circumstance, the judge, and the skills of the lawyers involved in each case.

This post has been edited by 3RA1N1AC: Apr 5 2005, 08:36 AM

[3RA1N1AC]

most roms don't fall into that category because older games get re-released on new platforms all the time, so a game can practically never become obsolete in the sense that there's no hardware to play them on.

the question is not whether the game itself is obsolete, but whether the hardware & storage format is obsolete. the format is the particular ROM chips and machine that the game was produced for. since one platform typically won't run another platform's software without emulation, the ROM remains inaccessible (in its intended form, i.e. a working playable game) until an emulator is created to access it.

[desertboy]

as for how all of that holds up in court, it's all very much a grey area as previously stated.  one might think "the law is the law is the law" and that's the end of that, but it really depends largely on the particular circumstance, the judge, and the skills of the lawyers involved in each case.

And country it's tried in, in fact more so on that than any other thing really.

[Kolk1604]

They'll be public domanin in 70 years when the copyright expires.

[EugeneEW3RD]

Roms, disk images & tape images are illegal to download if the copyright owners don't give their permission for them to be distributed on the Internet.

Some companies have released their roms for free download but most are not free to download. There are also homebrew roms which are developed/released for free for systems such as GBA, NES, Genesis, et al. Since Homebrew roms are freeware, they are legal to download.

When dealing with commerical roms, there is no 24 hour rule. Commerical roms are illegal to download & the 24 hour rule will not stand up in a court of law. The 24 hour rule was created by rom sites so that, IMO, their webhosts won't try to shutdown their sites.

Be careful what you read on the Internet. Some programmers have released their games w/out the permission of the company who owns the copyrights. Case in point, Al Lowe has done this. Al Lowe is the creator of the game called Leisure Suit Larry. Al Lowe has a website & on his site he has put up downloads of the PC games which he wrote at Sierra which are The Black Cauldron, Donald Duck's Playground, Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood, Mickey's Space Adventure & Troll's Tale. Unfortuntely, Al Lowe has violated the law, he has no permission form Sierra & Disney to put the games for download which means that what he has done is illegal.

Also, some companies have released their games as freeware years ago but the copyrights have been sold which means that the games are no longer freeware. For example, Sierra released their PC games called Betrayal at Krondor, Caesar, and Red Baron 3D in 1997 as freeware. But several years ago, Sierra was purchased by Vivendi Universal who now owns the rights to these games. Vivendi Universal doesn't allow these games to be downloaded for free anymore which means that downloading these 3 Sierra games is illegal.

Basically put, do your research on roms, disc images, tape images, PC game, et al before downloading because what might have been free years ago might be illegal nowadays.