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Question about legalities of Roms
Bgnome:
i believe the general stance of the community is against selling roms / including roms in the sale. even if you buy the rereleased software, ie atari's greatest hits, etc., that doesn't entitle you to actually owning the hardcode off a chip from a game board, much less a license to sell said code. as mentioned, starroms is a legal way to do it because they have a license, but once again, you cannot resell those roms. if you really want to be the nice guy, you can tell him about the rom burner folks or just give him some roms. that isnt altogether legal either, but giving it away and "selling" are two completely different things.
wj2k3:
Isn't selling a machine with MAME on it a no no too?
dag2000:
I think it unlikely that you'll find yourself sued.
That said, I'm pretty sure that you are not allowed to sell a cab with mame installed, according to the Mame license. The Mave dev team probably isn't coming after you but if you want to do it legit, I think what you would need to do Is sell a cab, cmputer installed and then explain to the owner what THEY need to do to download and install Mame. You could even tell them about tombstone burners.
Perhaps someone could venture an opinion as to whether it is permissible to let them hire you to do that work. I think the Mame license basically means that the user has to download the program(s) themselves.
Crazy Cooter:
I wouldn't include them and I wouldn't send them a CD either. I would tell them they can download them but they are similar to mp3's regarding copyright issues. Let them decide.
We've got a good thing with this. The companies that own the rights truely don't seem to mind that we do what we do. But if somebody starts making money off something they shouldn't be, they might come down on us and shut MAME down. So point them in the right direction and let sleeping dogs sleep.
PacManFan:
I've ebay'd a mame cab before, and I clearly stated "No roms are included". One I made the sale, and the person came to pick it up from my house, I gave her a FREE hardrive that just happened to have a good setup on it ;)
-PMF
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