Question about legalities of Roms

[Chris]

Williams Pinball ROMs include a license that explicitly limits their use to the supplied Williams hardware.

Which is interesting b/c (I won't post the link, but) I can go to Williams official website and download most of their pinball roms with no questions asked.

And if you click on the link to any of those ROMs, you get the license agreement, which reads  (in part):

1. License. The software installed through this process (the "Software") and any related documentation provided to you are licensed to you by Williams Electronics Games, Inc. or its affiliates ("Williams"), subject to the terms and conditions in this License Agreement. Williams retains title to the Software and related documentation. This license allows you to use the Software only in the specific pinball games manufactured by Williams and marketed under the WILLIAMS or BALLY trademark for which the Software is intended ("Pinball Games"). To do this, you are permitted to transfer the Software into a Flash ROM device in the Pinball Game. Other than the copy of the Software installed for you during this process, one (1) archival copy thereof, and the Flash ROM copies for installation into the Pinball Games, you may make no copies of the Software. You may not transfer or sublicense your license rights in the Software to another party or distribute copies of the Software, except that you may install Flash ROM copies of the Software into Pinball Games owned by others as part of servicing such Pinball Games, provided the owners of the Pinball Games read and agree to accept the terms and conditions of this License Agreement and provided you do not charge an additional fee for the provision of the Flash ROM copy of the Software. Under no circumstances may you sell copies of the Software, including Flash ROM copies. You may not publish the Software.

(Emphasis in the previous paragraph added by me.)

If you steal someone else's IP, I believe you can only be prosecuted to the extent that they can show loss of revenue from the infraction - i.e. in the case of arcade roms, if they really wanted to, the IP owners could probably come after us for the value of an arcade board containing the ROMS on E-bay (minus the value of the other chips on the board) so usually $10-15.

Yeah... it's the people distributing the ROMs that they really care about, and even then it's usually just a cease-and-desist.  

--Chris

[Tiger-Heli]

And if you click on the link to any of those ROMs, you get the license agreement, which reads  (in part):

Right, I just thought it ironic that Williams includes the same ROMS required for Visual Pinball for free on their site, while arcade ROMS are much harder to come by.

Perhaps, though, Williams has figured out that playing Black Knight on VP (despite being terrific fun and a great emulation) just insn't the same as owning a BK table, while playing Joust in MAME on a WG monitor in a converted arcade cab isn't much different (in many ways better) than playing an original Joust machine.

[Mameotron]

Well, I have to agree that as good as virtual pinball is, it just ain't the same as a real machine.  I loved Hyperball, but I can't see playing that on anything but a real machine.

[RayB]

There's a balance where it makes business sense to give away a little, in order to gain in the future. Shareware is founded on this concept and look how well it works (for good games). Give away a few levels, hook the player, they buy the full version.

Grocery store: Give away food samples, people like it, they buy the full package.

Coupons: Give a price break, people try it, if they like it they buy more.

Etc, etc...

It's when the whole package is given away that companies start to really holler. That's the problem with MP3 downloads. If you can get it for free, why buy it? Game ROMs are similar. If you can play it on MAME, why buy it? Luckily, old arcade games aren't much of a commodity. Pinball machines even less so. But when you see emulators pop up for very modern machines (for example when the N64 one appeared while the N64 was still Nintendo's primary system on the market) THAT was a problem.

~Ray B.

[Chris]

Fortunately, the reality of the situation is that the surviving game companies could stomp us into oblivion, sue the pants off the MAME devs, and go through the examples and take us out one by one, but they've chosen not to.  It's fantasy to believe that any company involved in arcade games is aware of MAME.  Sure, they'll take out the major public distribution points like mame.dk to keep it from being easy for the average joe, but by and large the community has not been given a lot of trouble.  Gottleib's been annoying on the pinball side, but of course it's not really Gottleib, just a company that bought their IP rights.  IT seems to have made an explicit decision to leave us alone as long as we stay away from recent vintages of Golden Tee.  And I'll bet there are some old game programmers out there that are happy to see someone playing their prototypes shelved by the companies they worked for.

I don't know why I'm posting this, as it really doesn't address the topic, but I don't wanna waste the typing so I'm hitting "post" anyway.