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Mame rom legality question
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ark_ader:

--- Quote from: Haze on September 13, 2013, 05:44:24 am ---just ignore ark_ader and his incorrect advice.

every time he gives bad / illegal advice on purpose I'm just hitting the report to moderator button, you should do the same.

if he continues, I'll concede that he wins and the forum doesn't want correct advice but would rather listen to people saying it's ok to use MAME where it isn't, and retire my account here.

--- End quote ---


I'm sorry Haze, but MAME is in such a legal haze (sorry poor choice of word) that it cannot enforce any usage rules, especially in international law.  The means of gathering the technical information to reverse engineer the technology it emulates is highly questionable.   There is also the problem of  intellectual rights to the said emulator as I can argue that I have a small investment in regards to development.  Heck nearly 1000 people helped code Mame in any one particular time, which brings ownership issues in any legal challenge.  Probably one saving grace in regards to a class action lawsuit.

But I can see that you have been gravely injured in my comments which I humbly offer my sincere apologies, but you are on a message board that is not Haze controlled and other peoples views are discussed.   If you object to any comments you are welcome to comment, report, or ignore.

I sometimes forget that you are the official spokesman for Mame, and that you own the majority of the code.
paigeoliver:
My one sticking support has always been the fact that mame specifically supports bootleg games and the bootleg software they run. Being that you can't really LEGALLY even be in possession of that software outside of a few failed states and 3rd world nations that don't recognize copyright protection so I am wondering how exactly that support was developed and why? Did one of the 10,000 people in Tuvalu who all share the same 1.5 meg internet connection code all the bootleg support? Even if they did, shouldn't that be in a fork from the main development?


--- Quote from: ark_ader on September 14, 2013, 05:51:46 am ---
--- Quote from: Haze on September 13, 2013, 05:44:24 am ---just ignore ark_ader and his incorrect advice.

every time he gives bad / illegal advice on purpose I'm just hitting the report to moderator button, you should do the same.

if he continues, I'll concede that he wins and the forum doesn't want correct advice but would rather listen to people saying it's ok to use MAME where it isn't, and retire my account here.

--- End quote ---


I'm sorry Haze, but MAME is in such a legal haze (sorry poor choice of word) that it cannot enforce any usage rules, especially in international law.  The means of gathering the technical information to reverse engineer the technology it emulates is highly questionable.   There is also the problem of  intellectual rights to the said emulator as I can argue that I have a small investment in regards to development.  Heck nearly 1000 people helped code Mame in any one particular time, which brings ownership issues in any legal challenge.  Probably one saving grace in regards to a class action lawsuit.

But I can see that you have been gravely injured in my comments which I humbly offer my sincere apologies, but you are on a message board that is not Haze controlled and other peoples views are discussed.   If you object to any comments you are welcome to comment, report, or ignore.

I sometimes forget that you are the official spokesman for Mame, and that you own the majority of the code.

--- End quote ---
jennifer:
      Thats an interesting point, and Id be the last one to ask given my limited exposure to the Mame...I have recently taken a newfound interest in the subject however, and have to give these guys some credit. what they have achieved over the years is quite amazing, although it seems a bit over complicated for the average curious user and seems to have a limited support group. [most likely due to to the legality factor].... Jennifer did however manage to get some Mame to work [not with the hyperspin] and had to trial and error her way through that much Because everyone was so secretive about the Roms.... I like what I finally saw, and have become to be a Mame believer.
Haze:
As I've said before, MAME is a *document*

It documents the good, as well as the bad, it documents history.

Bad things happen, ignoring bootlegs would be like history books conveniently ignoring WW2.  They represent an important part of the story, eg. how the Korean industry came to be, how the official SF2 Turbo came to be, why CPS2 was so heavily locked down etc.  It also can document the effectiveness of certain protection systems, which again is part of history (to date *nobody* has figured out Seibu's Raiden 2, and clearly NMK004 was effective for NMK too because all the bootlegs of USSAF Mustang ended up using music ripped from Raiden instead of a clone of the original chip) .  Furthermore the information we present can be correlated directly with the stories about how prototype games often got dumped at trade shows and ended up on the markets as bootlegs before the official products (Defender being the prime example, most of the bootlegs are based off the White label prototype build)

If MAME was just about playing the best version of games for free, I'd agree, we should get rid of the bootlegs, relegate them to another build, but it isn't.  MAME is about documenting what we know, what we've found, documenting our history.  If anything by taking such a serious impartial view of things it strengthens our legal position by making it clear that these are our goals.  Once you understand this you'll understand the reasons things are done as they are.

Other emulators, in the past, where the focus is purely on giving you playable games HAVE taken this approach, from memory Retrocade supported just the single 'Best' version of each game, different project, very different goals.

I find the points made by a certain other laughable at best.

Writing about illegal things, documenting them etc. doesn't make the project illegal.  The downloads on mamedev.org document what we know, they do not include the actual illegal material.

Furthermore many seemingly original games could well have illegal content.  Take the games DoDonPachi II - BeeStorm and Wyvern Wings, both from 2001, both use ripped mod files as the basis of their music, things taken from websites and used presumably without permission (WW has bits of Metallica / Slayer etc. in the music..)  Both are 'legitimate' products, but if MAME was to start ignoring everything which could be deemed of dubious legality for one reason or another you'd be surprised at the number of things that got dropped; it would be far greater than the obvious 'bootlegs' and could well extend into popular series'  (I believe some later ports of Rainbow Islands can't use the original music because it's such a shameless rip of 'somewhere over the rainbow' the legal departments of the publishers decided against it eg. the Saturn / PSX? versions )

As I said, the role of the project is to document history, not rewrite it or selectively ignore it.

With the ever increasing prominence of MESS in the project and codebase it should also be becoming clearer than ever that the emulator isn't about playing free games.  MAME already supports various firmware update programs (pointless if you just want to play a game) but once you open up the MESS side of the code you've got ancient mainframe terminals (with no practical use these days) to built-it-yourself z80 based boards (distributed as schematics + rom in the first place), alarm clocks, eeprom programmers (virtual rom dumping ftw!), car computers (well maybe you could hook it up to the accelerometer on a laptop?), calculators, phones, chess computers, you name it, and while there is some friction regarding some of that code and some members of Mamedev it is still part of what MAME is and what our technology is documenting / running, even if you have to compile it separately for now.  Just because these things aren't as widely talked about as some other parts of our project and aren't currently supported in MAME by default (although I expect as the project further matures this will change) doesn't mean they've had any less time spent on them or they're any less part of what we do.


--- Quote from: paigeoliver on September 14, 2013, 10:30:35 pm ---My one sticking support has always been the fact that mame specifically supports bootleg games and the bootleg software they run. Being that you can't really LEGALLY even be in possession of that software outside of a few failed states and 3rd world nations that don't recognize copyright protection so I am wondering how exactly that support was developed and why? Did one of the 10,000 people in Tuvalu who all share the same 1.5 meg internet connection code all the bootleg support? Even if they did, shouldn't that be in a fork from the main development?

--- End quote ---
ark_ader:
Without stirring the pot or shaking the beehive,  you have to look at how MAME operates, in relation to end user interaction, instead of code mechanics.

We all accept that MAME is an emulator that requires rom files to operate.  By itself, without the said roms, the software provides instructional output to assist in its operation.  Forks aside.

The roms come from system boards of the actual arcade machine, which had to be dumped to removable media via physical interaction with the hardware.  We know that these arcade system boards (ASB) have in the early days of the project, came from collectors that wanted a backup of the ASB incase of ASB failure. MAME promised those collectors a software replacement.

Roll on a few years and the project has worldwide media attention, but to keep true to the original concept, the project requests funds from the general public to buy ASB from major online auction sites,  where these rare ASB are located.  The ASB are dumped by the dumping project and are made available to the MAME developers to include in the project.  The bought ASB are not held in storage to show tracability in relation to the backup principles for copyrighted works, but sold on for revenue for these boards.

These files that are dumped are released to a select few, who at the time offered a library of rom images to the general public.  The onus on the end user of the roms to use them if they had the original hardware.  ::)

Another issue from the ASB is encryption.   Other companies during the 1980s were hacking game roms (using similar techniques that the associated parties use for the project) changing colors, level design or adapting them to different ASB architecture.  So these main companies created encryption to protect their intellectual property.  This is where the beehive is being wobbled.

Cracking encrypted software is necessary to allow the game to function with MAME.  This cracking of encryption was a contravention of copyright law.  Haze on his website regularly promotes this activity of cracking encryption.   Personally this is a sore point with me, as it teaches our youth that hacking protected systems is a good thing.  Where our banking and personal information is secured.  We cannot place full blame on Haze as our governments engage in such practices, but Haze is just an individual.  Look at it from Nintendo or SEGA's perspective,  where millions of dollars in research and development have been unlocked by some software hackers.  Yes it is hardware that is old, but who makes the determination that it is safe to breach intellectual property rights?

Now we roll on to today.  Copyright law has been ridiculed, broken and apparently unenforceable.   If these giants of the gaming industry did not take a stand against a mass breach of intellectual property rights, what stops our youth from committing the same acts on modern games?  This is not a subject that can be construed as a laughing matter.  It is quite serious and will have ramifications in the future.
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