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How to legally purchase Mame ROMs
tw661:
How do I legally purchase Mame ROMs? There are a ton of games that I want to play. How do I get the ROMs legally. I saw Starroms.com, but that isn't nearly enough. And I don't want to search to buy all of the oriiginal game boards either.
Thanks for your help.
Patent Doc:
Well, I had a very long answer for you, but lucky you I lost my connection while typing it and never noticed so when I hit send I lost the reply. In a nutshell, there is NO legal way to obtain the ROMS that has been tested in the courts apart from buying them from starroms or having first hand knowledge that the copyright has been terminated and thus donated to the public domain.
Copyrights expire 70yrs beyond the death of the author and can be extended after that so don't wait for expiration.
IF you want to obtain the ROMS the only possible legal approach (note the ROMS are likely not illegal just your possession of them) you need to own the original PCB for every ROM. This way you might fall under the "fair use doctrine" of the US Copyright law (no idea what happens anywhere else). Though you are still taking a risk. (See Sections 117 and 905 of Title 17 of the US Code). The only real sure way to avoid any illegailities is to obtain a written liscence to own the ROM from the copyright owner. Short of this the water is really muddy.
Hope this helps. Incidently the Project Arcade book has a nice two page section on this topic.
SirPeale:
Or you can buy them from starroms.com
Or you can get a HotRod. Those come with some of the Capcom ROMs.
There are several different ways to get legal ROMsets.
SirPoonga:
I don't know where it went, but there was a sticky thread for sometime that saint started on legal roms, either in the software or everything else section.
Howard_Casto:
For the record, and only for the record thanks to the dmca and the work of the riaa there is no such thing as fair use.
In other words, other than starroms and public roms there are NO legal ways to obtain roms.
Why? Because the riaa took advantage or some of the more vauge portions of the dmca. There is a portion of the dmca that says any purposeful circumvention of any steps, hardware or otherwise, put in place to keep data contained is in violation of copyright. (i'm not wording this properly i'm sure)
A little sketchy on what is circumvetion huh? Well they took advantage of that fact and basically took away our "free use" rights. They said that transferring the data to a computer was in violation of the dmca. Now considering that audio cds don't have any copy protection and they keep winning their cases this pretty much means that free use is dead. And remember, most pcbs do have some form of hardware protection (again as loosely as the dmca is worded, not having a ready-made port to extract the eprom data can be considered hardware protection).
Regardless of that:
For some reason people think that own the original pcb means something. It doesn't. That's like saying owning the snes version of mortal kombat entitles you to a copy of the genesis version.
When you buy a device with software on it like that you buy the hardware and lease the software. You can never own software unless specifically given that right. In other words you have the right to do anything you like to a pcb, but you don't have any rights pretaining to the data on the eprom chips. Unless specifically noted (like pc software) you are only given the right to use said software on the hardware it came on becuase once you strip away the physical components you are left with pure intellectual property, which you don't have any claim to.