I've been in the emulation scene for a while and am wondering which roms are considered public domain. A while back I heard about a "law" or something that said if the company no longer produced and or sold the game / system it was considered public domain. I'm pretty sure it's legal to own the roms of games that you owned, I used to have supermario brothers 3 for nes would it then be considered legal to download, or would I need to create the rom myself? So I also heard that old arcade, atari, intellivision roms are free/public domain, is this true. If you know please help.

So overall what are free/public domain and if I owned the original is it legal to own the rom?

See pinned topic above "Beginners Guide To Xbox Emulation, New to emulation? Read this first!





To be honest I think many people ask these types of questions knowing full well they intend to get the roms anyway, but just want to "hear what makes em feel better"

As for your "used to own" comment - I would like to see that hold up anywhere. Well i used to own that movie/game/software - I just can't seem to find it

There are also many topics related to this (this question pops up quite a bit as you can imagine), but you can press the search button as well as I. Happy hunting

I actually searched for "roms legality" and no joy. And I am telling the truth I could take a picture and post it if need be, My old nes system bit the dust years ago so I gave most of my old cart's to my cousins who's nes still works fine but since they already had smb3 then they didnt need it. So used to own was in reference to the system as it was tossed with the garbage, but I still have a few carts and the controllers and "light gun" lol

PS I did read both of those and was actually asking what roms were considered public domain/free as I couldn't find it.

I'm no lawyer or anything, but I have had a class or two about Intellectual Property law. Anything covered under copyright laws (which I'm pretty sure video games are) are protected for the authors lifetime and 70 years afterwards. This includes books, music, movies, paintings, etc. So if my guess is correct, we have a while to wait for the copyrights to expire. But thats not to say some company won't release their games into the public domain.

If any or all of this is wrong, someone please correct me.

I've just been wondering for a real long time as i've seen many claims that older systems circa atari are legal to download roms as it is a way of keeping gaming history alive, but i'm not sure and thats why im asking.

Such claims are false. If the copyright has not expired and the copyright owner has not released the intellectual property into public domain, any unauthorized reproduction is piracy. Atari in particular still very much believes in the continued value of their IPs regardless of their age, as displayed by their affiliation with Starroms, to my knowledge the only place where you can legally purchase and download game roms. A handful of previously commercial titles have also been released into the public domain, such as Zero Tolerance for the Genesis or Daikatana for the Game Boy, but these are by and large the exception and not the rule. That said, the fact that large chunk of old games for past consoles are out-of-production, often the product of long-defunct companies who can no longer profit from them, and many times ignored by their current copyright owners certainly makes an argument in favor of the morality of downloading them, but the legality of such an activity remains a more distinct issue.

You might be supprised as to what you will find... The grey area becomes greyer...

www.copyright.gov.htm

On October 28, 2003, the Librarian of Congress, on the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, announced the classes of works subject to the exemption from the prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. The four classes of works exempted are:

Section 3

(3) Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

Most roms, like the ones that mame requires fall into this catogory...

Most laws can be interpreted many ways... make of this what you will...

Basically if the system is no longer manufactured, no longer available to buy in the market place, then copyright laws can be manipulated...
Not to say you can start selling roms as this would still be infringment and theft...

Jackerl

As well, I think downloading of products you already own is still illegal.

Even if you were allowed personal back-ups (which any company would fight in court), the ROMs distributed online aren't copies of your game. Unless you dump the contents of the ROM yourself, you become part of illegal distribution.

Morally, it's not anything wrong. But, you never know when Nintendo or Atari will re-release one of the their franchise icons, and look to profit.

IANAL

But I still don't think you are getting sued for downloading roms perhaps if you host them or sell them but you will be pretty safe by just downloading them.

Jackal - "and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access". So they define obsolete, and by their def, most of these systems are. But check the first line. The original media or hardware is not required as a condition of access. Or at least, Im pretty sure my xbox and pc arent NESs.

so... even more confusion!!! personally I think its a crime for Nintendo to put out GBA remakes of their games for $20 a piece. So... WE

ehb

omg i'm linking to r0mz!!!

located there is pretty much the only console rom ever released as freeware by its original creators.

Zero Tolerance (and its unfinished sequel beyond zero tolerance)

all hail tecnopop!

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.


it's illegal to download any copyrighted item (even if you own the original). the only legal way to own a backup is to make it yourself from the original. whether or not legal action would be taken against you would be up to the copyright holder.

Again as I said these grey area laws are very open to interpretation, how do you think there are sooo many websites offering Rom Burnings for a small charge to cover costs? Would not these have been sued or stopped ages ago for distributing...? I mean you can even pay via paypal for these services which is highly traceable...

Thought there was a big difference between the actual roms from the obsolete arcade machines and the re-released games. For one thing, the re-released games do not run on the original arcade machines, it is illegal to copy and distribute these cos they are re-written for modern day systems that are still reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

The actual arcade roms that need the original arcade hardware to work which are not still reasonably available in the commercial marketplace, fall into a different category...

Do the re-released games contain the actual rom image or is it completely re-written code? I know the Dragons Lair series actually contain the arcade images, but these are cheep enough to buy off ebay if you want them anyway, but as for the rest...

A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

Note the stored in that format bit. Rewritten games are a different format.

Still, if you feel that you are breaking the law, then don't download or distribute, as it’s your own personal conscience...

But still I feel the debate will continue.

Jackerl

Yeah I know, i'm just saying that the changes of being sued are small. It's tolerated by the feds they won't send in a swat team to recover your collection of NES roms.
Just like smoking weed, ofcourse it's illegal in most country's but not much of them will arrest you if you smoke a joint on the street (excluding country's with no personal freedom).

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.

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.

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

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

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.