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emulation: legal question about dead motherboards

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SavannahLion:
Thought I might as well respond to this.


--- Quote from: megaultrasuper on June 20, 2007, 01:51:55 pm ---
--- Quote from: shardian on June 20, 2007, 01:27:30 pm ---MAME is not licensed for commercial use.

--- End quote ---

I know.

However, there are other emulators other than MAME.  Additionally, nothing theoretically stops me from coding my own emulator for this purpose. 

EDIT: This would still be illegal since it circumvents copyright protection.

--- End quote ---

That's the wrong legal reason. Creating an emulator is a protected and court proven legal act with interesting loopholes (against you) in recent statutes like the DMCA.

The real legal issues isn't about the emulator itself, it's the ROMS.

Dreamwriter:

--- Quote from: Fozzy The Bear on June 20, 2007, 01:31:50 pm ---You'd be running the copied software on a system it was not designed to run on. In the USA that would be a breach of the DMCA.

In actual fact the act alone of dumping the ROMS except for archival purposes (backup of the originals for repair of the original hardware) would also be illegal.
--- End quote ---

Not quite.  It's not illegal to run copies of software on systems it was not designed to run on, in the US at least.  Emulation is perfectly legal.  Nor, interestingly enough, is dumping ROMs.  What *is* illegal is distributing said ROMs (so you can't download them, or upload them, sell them, etc.), and breaking encryption.  If you have to break encryption to dump the ROMs (say, dumping a CPS3 game), *that* is illegal.

Of course, this is all based on my knowledge of the DMCA - maybe there are other laws covering this that I know nothing about.

SavannahLion:

--- Quote from: Dreamwriter on June 21, 2007, 12:37:22 am ---Nor, interestingly enough, is dumping ROMs.

--- End quote ---

I really had to do some digging around, I knew I remember reading about a court case where ROM dumping was founded to be illegal based on the argument I presented above. That solid state based ROMs were exempted from section 17 USC 117 (The archival rule) because they were not considered volatile media. (As a software developer, I realize the truth is a little different, but we're discussing what the court says, not what physical laws of the universe say.)

Atari vs JS&A in 1983 established ROM copying illegal as I describe it.
It was later modified in 1992(?) with SEGA vs Accolade to give software developers the right to dump said ROMS for the purposes of developing software, eg emulators. If I understand it right, that right does not apply to the average end user.
I know there's a third case that addresses this, but for the life of me I can't remember who was involved. I'm convinced it was Nintendo. Then there's two or three semi-related cases involving companies like IBM about dumping the BIOS of computers.

The DMCA throws a monkey wrench in the whole thing. The way I understand it, the DMCA makes selling the tools to dump the ROMS illegal. I believe this was shown in Nintendo vs Lik-Sang which forced Lik-Sang to remove the ROM dumpers they used to sell.

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