Main > Everything Else

Discussion: Ultracade and the Mame Trademark

Pages: << < (133/154) > >>

GGKoul:


--- Quote from: rchadd on March 09, 2005, 06:09:38 am ---the mame roms will just go onto bittorrent network or MIRC- how the hell does he think he would stop that? is he going to go after each individual?

--- End quote ---

They are already there...

mr.Curmudgeon:


--- Quote from: GGKoul on March 09, 2005, 09:51:34 am ---
--- Quote from: rchadd on March 09, 2005, 06:09:38 am ---the mame roms will just go onto bittorrent network or MIRC- how the hell does he think he would stop that? is he going to go after each individual?

--- End quote ---

They are already there...

--- End quote ---

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, if the heat (ie: legal challenges on rom ownership) gets to be too much for MAME developers to work through (which wouldn't be a lot of heat, mind you. They *are* doing this for free, so I can't see them taking *any* personal risk), there would be no further development of MAME. No games added, no drivers updated. That, to me, is the biggest possible tragedy of this whole debacle.

That Foley *can't* stop roms from being distributed on bittorrent, et al. isn't as important as the possibility of him stopping further development of MAME altogether.

With each new MAME release, I look forward to rediscovering something. Some old, obscure, lost memory...or something new, a game I'd had never had the chance to encounter before. If the MAME team were to give up, in lieu of constantly spending their time defending themselves (even if we supported them w/ a "MAME Defense Fund", they'd still have to spend inordinate amounts of time filing legal papers)...the journey stops.

Yes, I KNOW there are already THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of games to choose from, even were development to stop TODAY. However, to me, MAME has always been about the journey of rediscovery. Were it to stop, I feel a little bit of that magic dies.

If you don't think this can happen, think again. Retro-gaming is FAST becoming a huge commerical fad. There is an Ultracade at WALMART for christsakes, and besides that, you can get those 12-in-1 gaming joysticks by the buttload there. StarRoms catalog of ROMS is dwindling, instead of growing larger, due to licensing conflicts with Atari, as Atari works to put out even more of their own "classic collections." How long before everyone is following suit?

Are there members of the community that are willing and/or able to pick up development on MAME and take it "underground", should Nicolas back off? Or is this emulator on borrowed time?

Or should we work even harder to shut Foley down and make him regret taking the abhorrent, ethically challenged position he has taken against the MAME development team and the retro-gaming community? At what point do we, as a group, take action against Foley? I'm tired of waiting to see what he does...to me, it's obvious he doesn't care about any of the things we hold dear here at the BYOAC forum!!

Basically, I'm asking for a summation of where we're at in this fight. What should we expect going forward, and what do we plan to do about it should we decide to be proactive in our defense of an emulator, and a community we have all grown to love.




mrC

GGKoul:

You are forgetting.. when the MAME team does a ROM dump.  They are doing it from the actual board.  So them doing a ROM dump is OK because they actually own the board that they are dumping.

So emulating a ROM you own is legally OK for the MAME team.

mr.Curmudgeon:


--- Quote from: GGKoul on March 09, 2005, 10:55:40 am ---So emulating a ROM you own is legally OK for the MAME team.

--- End quote ---

Well, if they are forced to defend this...I can imagine it holding up in a licensing battle. Especially given the fact that their emulator software is freely, and widely, distributed.

BLEEM, for example, was one company (Sony) against one development group (BLEEM). Once that case was over, BLEEM's fight was over. Plus, it was worth it for BLEEM to fight, as they were selling a commercial product, and they stood to make a profit (I believe). If roms licenses become a hot commodity, there will be *many* license holders against *one* development group (MAME). I can't imagine MAME devs fighting against any company, let alone many of them, for the right to distribute FREE software, based on their FREE time?!

Help me alleviate this fear. So far, I haven't heard a strong argument suggesting that MAME is in the clear...

mrC

IntruderAlert:

Here are the results from some relevant polls on Kevin's Retroblast site:



Pages: << < (133/154) > >>

Go to full version