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Why are rom selling sites not closed down?
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ubiquityman:

--- Quote ---well if you think about it, i kinda does...it sets a legal precedent.

the way the law is, it (currently) it doesn't specify what (if any) information is contained on the original medium. ROMs although in their original state are an unusual medium, are still a form of recording, and albeit an unusual recording requiring unusual machine to extract it...DOES NOT however, require any sort of "code breaking" or "disassembly" or "circumvention" to be able to procure that copy... therefore making a copy of it for your own personal use is absolutely legal regardless of how the original came to be.

--- End quote ---

It's probably not a good ideal to tell people something is legal when it clearly is not.

http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml
Can I make private copies of movies, audiobooks, or software?
NO. The Private Copying Regime only addresses making private copies for your own use of sound recordings of musical works.

The "private use" exemption on copyright ONLY APPLIES TO MUSIC.  
It does NOT apply to all audio recordings.
It does NOT apply to movies.
It does NOT apply to software.  
It does NOT apply to ROMs.
It only applies to "musical works".

Havok's approach may be more appropriate in this situation.   ;)

If you prefer the regulatory text from the Canadian Copyright Act:
Part VII, Private Copying" §80 Copying for Private Use
(1) Subject to subsection (2), the act of reproducing all or any substantial part of
(a) a musical work embodied in a sound recording,
(b) a performer’s performance of a musical work embodied in a sound recording, or
(c) a sound recording in which a musical work, or a performer’s performance of a musical work, is embodied
onto an audio recording medium for the private use of the person who makes the copy does not constitute an infringement of the copyright in the musical work, the performer’s performance or the sound recording.

“musical work” means any work of music or musical composition, with or without words, and includes any compilation thereof;
UberCade:
There's actually a guy who owns a video game shop here where I live and he sells a lot of everything, but mostly used and older stuff, like Xbox, PS2, and more retro systems and accessories, etc. I went in to his shop one time and he was selling a modded Xbox with a big hard drive chock full of roms for a lot of emulated systems! I was like  :o. I didn't want to be a jerk and rat him out, but, damn...

I think more often than not the wide swinging hammer of justice just hasn't come around yet to knock them off their pedestal. They'll get found out eventually. But, depending on what they're selling, if it's several decades old like original Atari/Namco/Williams roms, those companies probably aren't going to pitch much of a fit about it, because like other people have said they're not making money off those games anymore, but they still own the intellectual rights. If the site is hosted in a country with no internet laws though it makes it harder for companies to prosecute. That's why most P2P sites are hosted in those countries.
Gatt:

--- Quote from: Dizzle on March 06, 2010, 03:46:28 pm ---I wonder what the economic impact on some smaller companies would be if anyone decided to really come down hard on the kind of sites you mention.    If roms were extremely hard to come by, would there still be as much demand for products made by GroovyGameGear or Ultimarc?  I'm sure they would still get business, but I imagine that it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as much.  The whole retro gaming solution would probably be a lot smaller than it is now.

Just a thought.

--- End quote ---

I think there's a fine line with the topic of Rom's.

Mame has been funded through donations from a group of fairly highly technical users,  without their support,  Mame likely wouldn't have advanced nearly as far as it has due to funding restrictions.

Companies have,  in the past,  found value in Mame's code,  either as a reference or a template,  for their own rereleases of arcade packs.

I strongly suspect that so long as Mame remains in the domain of a group of fairly highly technical users who would be considered small by market standards,  that at least some companies are content to ignore Rom distribution in favor of benefits from Mamedev's work in reducing time to market of their own arcade packs,  which likely sell to a much larger market.

What I mean is,  theoretically,  Microsoft could use Mame's codebase to rapidly build a library of arcade games on Live,  and sell people the roms.  I doubt Microsoft cares about a couple thousand Mamers in contrast to the millions of X-boxers they can sell to,  and they know they'll do better releasing more classics faster.

So I strongly suspect that any niche distribution will go overlooked as long as Mame remains a product that isn't accessible to the average user.  Especially since I'd imagine that all of the companies in question have some significant percentage of employees who themselves are fans of emulation of old systems.

Lets be honest,  all of the companies in question know about Mame,  and it's distribution methods.  They are software companies,  they have computer scientists and software engineers everywhere,  who generally are well aware of emulation.  If they were going to make any major push,  they already would have.
Haze:

--- Quote from: Gatt on March 08, 2010, 04:25:17 am ---
--- Quote from: Dizzle on March 06, 2010, 03:46:28 pm ---I wonder what the economic impact on some smaller companies would be if anyone decided to really come down hard on the kind of sites you mention.    If roms were extremely hard to come by, would there still be as much demand for products made by GroovyGameGear or Ultimarc?  I'm sure they would still get business, but I imagine that it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as much.  The whole retro gaming solution would probably be a lot smaller than it is now.

Just a thought.

--- End quote ---

I think there's a fine line with the topic of Rom's.

Mame has been funded through donations from a group of fairly highly technical users,  without their support,  Mame likely wouldn't have advanced nearly as far as it has due to funding restrictions.

Companies have,  in the past,  found value in Mame's code,  either as a reference or a template,  for their own rereleases of arcade packs.

I strongly suspect that so long as Mame remains in the domain of a group of fairly highly technical users who would be considered small by market standards,  that at least some companies are content to ignore Rom distribution in favor of benefits from Mamedev's work in reducing time to market of their own arcade packs,  which likely sell to a much larger market.

What I mean is,  theoretically,  Microsoft could use Mame's codebase to rapidly build a library of arcade games on Live,  and sell people the roms.  I doubt Microsoft cares about a couple thousand Mamers in contrast to the millions of X-boxers they can sell to,  and they know they'll do better releasing more classics faster.

So I strongly suspect that any niche distribution will go overlooked as long as Mame remains a product that isn't accessible to the average user.  Especially since I'd imagine that all of the companies in question have some significant percentage of employees who themselves are fans of emulation of old systems.

Lets be honest,  all of the companies in question know about Mame,  and it's distribution methods.  They are software companies,  they have computer scientists and software engineers everywhere,  who generally are well aware of emulation.  If they were going to make any major push,  they already would have.

--- End quote ---

The development team aren't selling Hard Drives full of ROMs, which is what this thread was about.

It's probably only a matter of time before somebody decides to care about it.  Some of the other operations have taken more than a year to shut down AFAIK.  If they're using the MAME name / trademark to sell the ROMs then Aaron would be interested tho, people trying to take advantage of the project for their own personal profit like this annoys the developers, and if they're using the MAME logo etc. to try and look like an official service then it's even worse, others have been had c&ds from the development team over this in the past.

The actual development team emulate PCBs, they don't sell ROMs, they don't profit from piracy, or try and profit from the work of others.
shateredsoul:
Yeah.. i'm pretty sure they sell them as "mame" sets and use the mame logo
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