Other than capital crimes, civil matters are hard to pursue, especially if you do them in your own home. Who is to know?
I guess you never heard of the RIAA... 
And they haven't heard of me either.
I pay for all my music and films. We are discussing roms not music or movies.
Music and films is actively sold and reissued. You should be sued for thousands for procuring music and films you have not paid for.
And I wasn't just talking about you....
I was responding to this line:
Other than capital crimes, civil matters are hard to pursue, especially if you do them in your own home. Who is to know?
Ark, we get that you walk on water with regards to copyright matters. But in responding to the point you brought up in your follow-up, I wanted to remind people that middle income housewives, college students, etc. - people who are by no means "criminals" by society's standards, were being bullied out of tens of thousands of dollars by the RIAA (which was the settlement; they were actually being sued for millions in some cases). Yes what they were doing was illegal and wrong - but they were naive. Remember a lot of us grew up taping albums for each other or off the radio and the music industry was slow to provide consumers with the equivalent of the "single" (be it 45, Cassingle, etc.) in the dawn of the digital age. They were oblivious to the damage they were causing because it seemed "innocent" and "victimless". While I agree there should be some punishment; it should have been realistic, not financially devastating.
So now onto ROMS. Video game publishers don't go after ROM dealers as fiercely for two reasons:
(1) It's not that widespread. Talk to 10 average people. Ask them if they'd ever downloaded music illegally. Then ask them if they downloaded ROMs. I'm guessing your responses would be 8-10 "yes" answers for the former and 0-1 "yes" answers for the latter (and mostly confused looks).
(2) Publishers making games today are more concerned with piracy of their latest titles, which is a big problem. And people sharing the illegal code can and do get found out (though it's often just a warning from their ISP telling them to knock it off.)
So Ark, when you say:
I have also come to the conclusion that nothing is illegal, except obviously capital crimes. You can do anything you want.
It makes it sound like publishers are just
lying down on this. But watch, if and when it becomes easy enough for some non-technically inclined schmo to get illegal games with ease (like it was for MP3s) so that publishers take serious hits, you'll see that you cannot just do anything you want. They can do what the RIAA and start suing people for hundreds of thousands
per title with minimal effort. It's not that hard.
But money talks and for right now, prevention (see: most consoles' protection since the NES) is much cheaper than prosecution.