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This is something that's always confused me.
PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 12:54 am
by Sheenar
Are ROM's legal or not? I think they would definitely be guilty of copyright infringement, but I keep hearing different things from different sources about their legality.
It would be cool to be able to play old games again, but I don't want to go the ROM route if it is illegal. If it is, I'll just go find one of my friends that has a NES and play at their place...
PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 4:40 am
by ShiroiHikari
Eurgh...it's a gray area. Before the Virtual Console, anyway. It's kinda like the CD ripping argument. My personal feeling is, why pay for a game you already paid for once? :\
PostPosted: Fri Jan 11, 2008 5:52 am
by TriezGamer
ROMs of games you don't already legally own are illegal. ROMs of games you do own are a sort of gray area -- I would argue that it's legal because you already own it, and there are stipulations in law that point to it being legal for personal use, however to my knowledge no court cases have ever come up to clarify this.
ROMs essentially range from illegal to gray-area at best.
I personally have no qualms about ROMs, particularly for games never released in the US with fan-translations available, but I'm also the kind of person who will often buy things from services like Nintendo's VC -- If the games were available for purchase, I'd buy them. But they aren't.