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Is this board legal?
paigeoliver:
The Mame project is in no real danger because it isn't worth anyone's money to go after. Sure you could shut down the website and spend terrific amounts of money to try to drag the developers into court in their native countries (good luck there). Even then I don't believe there is a single copyright holder out there who has enough revenue at stake from the involved IP to make it worth the costs involved. Even if they did it wouldn't do anything because the horse has already left the barn. The source code is out there for anyone to mess with. The executables and rom images will float out there forever. All the relevant stuff got emulated more or less perfectly only a few years into the project before the project was even a blip on the radar of the IP holders. The rest of the stuff that got added through the years has little or no commercial value, even though much of it was emulating current arcade games. It is either too obscure to have any commercial value in a rerelease (almost all the 2D stuff), or it was 3D and 3D games do not age well (nor do well in rereleases).
--- Quote from: Le Chuck on March 03, 2012, 01:56:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: Ule on March 03, 2012, 01:44:09 pm ---It's all MAME fault.
Instead of saying on their splash screen: "Use of ROMs is illegal...blah, blah".
They should have said: "These ROMs are abandonware, they are not sold and copyright holders do not exist. We provide all the ROMs here for free and if there is someone who would like to claim a copyright please step forward to prove it, inform us where can we buy the game and if requested we will be happy to remove the game from our emulator."
That's what they should have said, and everything would have been different.
--- End quote ---
The MAME devs correctly stated the law. What they listed is not an "interpretation". If they listed your proposed language it would not have altered the law one iota and could have compromised the project. What is the legal stance on abandonware again? Oh that's right, it doesn't exist. Failure to locate a copyright holder does not constitute permission to recreate the product.
--- End quote ---
amendonz:
Doesn't a copyright holder need to be actively protecting it's copyright's to be still valid? Doesn't seem like they are here. I could be wrong though
paigeoliver:
That is a trademark, not a copyright.
--- Quote from: amendonz on March 03, 2012, 02:40:16 pm ---Doesn't a copyright holder need to be actively protecting it's copyright's to be still valid? Doesn't seem like they are here. I could be wrong though
--- End quote ---
amendonz:
Ahh , my bad.
alfonzotan:
I will MAKE it legal!