Main > Main Forum
New rules regarding copyright and the DMCA: How is MAME effected?
lloydcom:
Uh no. I used to have that idea, but all I own is the right to play the said game not the copyright of the game I have in my collection. So if you have Pacman for the 2600 you do not have the rights to play and keep the original rom.
BUT
If you have an Atari 400 game of Star Raiders and the Atari died a death (or you threw it out the window because you had it with that :censored: keyboard) and you wanted to play that old favorite again. You can hack the roms and dump it to disk and run it in an emulator.
You do not OWN the rom for distribution and it would have to be dumped in the confines of your domicile. The owner of the game is probably Hasbro, and most likely will bring out star raiders in some other form like those TV games.
But Fozzy missed the whole point of both threads yet again. The question was not about owning the rom, but how that rom was dumped to preserve it in a library form. I think MAME is a library of sorts. I library of emulated computers capable of running these old softwares that are considered negated under copyright law, as per that directive.
But that directive also covers mobile phones and pay per view cable boxes. I have a similar gripe about Sky +. Did you know if you recorded movies on the Sky + with subscription say April and then your cancelled the movies in May the Sky+ will lock out the movies you paid to see and record later?
If I had the same problem in the US, you could use that directive to bypass Sky and use a 3rd party utility to watch those movies you paid to watch the month previous. If you were sued by Sky in the US for doing so, you can use this directive to argue the point in court.
A bit long winded and moot as there is no Sky+ in the states, but it shows what this directive can be used for outside of the arcade roms issue which this thread got complicated and misdirected.
If anything it will cover Guru, and his endevours to amass the arcade library.
Patent Doc:
--- Quote ---Hrmm... lots of ranting and basically nobody has it right.
--- End quote ---
No offense, but exactly how is what you said any different. I and others have said the same thing though not in the same words
--- Quote ---Prior to this (but post DMCA), it was illegal to break any kind of encryption for the purpose of backup copies. In America, we had been allowed to make backup copies.
Where it got fuzzy was online distribution and circumventing the protection/encryption. You were no longer making your own copy, and DMCA made it illegal to break the measures taken to keep you from doing it. Kind of a catch-22 there.
--- End quote ---
compare to
--- Quote ---one of the issues with respect to owning ROMs is that there was "circumvention" associated with the movement of the rom from the chip on the board to your PC. This is because originally you needed the hardware to access the game. Owning a mame rom gets around this. So even if you own the game you may have been violating DMCA. As the game itself is obsolete and no longer being manufactured (exception being pac man, ms pac, galaga and some others) then as the rule reads you are no longer in violation of DMCA.
--- End quote ---
and
--- Quote ---Regarding the copyrights, as I and others said earlier, this rule change ony impacts those of us that own the original game or arguably the original board. Under US law a fair use would be to make a personal archive of something you already have rights to. This is really the key, you must have rights to the origianl. Under DMCA arguably though you lawfully had rights to the original if for some reason the orgiianl stopped working, you were prevented from circumventing the obsolete hardware so you could put the rom on a CD or other media. This means that the DMCA was preventing you from enjoying something you had rights to use. I disagree with Fozzy that the archive just had to sit there...there is enough case law out there that siggests the archival copy could be used. Nonetheless, now you can make the archival copy without fear of the DMCA, for the next 3 years at least.
--- End quote ---
Granted yours was much more succinct, but not new for sure.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[*] Previous page
Go to full version