Are ROMS legal?

[sirdavinator]

See title.

[K]

They are illegal no matter what. Anyone who says they are legal if deleted in 24 hours, or if you own the cartrdige is wrong. They are illegal.

[Herr Matzat]

the second were a game is riped it starts becomming illegal.

it even is illegal wen you are one of the nerds that is able to write games for a specific system becaus you don´t own the licens of producing games for that system, besides, the second you use an emulator it becomes illegal becaus you use a stolen bios.

on the other hand, as long as you keep it free and old most likly no one will ever care (lets say ~everything pre PSX)

ui would like to know who the hell made that silly 24 houre rule up.

[sirdavinator]

Thanks.

[Robsturgh]

Im seriously suprised that anything significant hasnt been done about it, as far as I know a few sites have been forced to take down roms, but nothing really groundbreaking.

[caucasianheat]

Im seriously suprised that anything significant hasnt been done about it, as far as I know a few sites have been forced to take down roms, but nothing really groundbreaking.

←

Numerous rom sites have been taken down recently, making it much more difficult to find roms online. I'll agree with Keith that are indeed illegal, no matter what. People who calim to usethem fro backups are full of shit.

[stokeriño]

Im seriously suprised that anything significant hasnt been done about it, as far as I know a few sites have been forced to take down roms, but nothing really groundbreaking.

←

Presumably because with the majority of ROM games (i.e. old ones) the companies are pissed off but it's not as if they're losing a significant amount of money so they won't bother with the complex legal processes and costs to try and combat it. Unlike the music industry, although whether they're really losing much money as a direct result of file sharing has been disputed.

[Herr Matzat]

legal fight against roms seems to be hughe in the asian room, nintendo seems to be very concerned about keeping their home marked clean from this stuff, i guss we are lucky that they see us more as a very good extra income on that point.

In japan they even hunt down guys that rip grafiks for the RPG maker 2000+ (thats a nice PC thing were you can make your own RPGs, not good enough to make it comercial by anny means but still great to "copy that japanes 2d rpg style")

and japan has some more up todate handhelds that they need to care about while we only have NGC as serius think in the marked (japan at least has wondersan as something we don´t have)

[The Equivocate]

Oddly enough, the actual emulators are perfectly legal.

[The Kraig]

I think Nintendo recently patented the emulators for GBA games. Meaning if you don't have VisualBoy Advance, or a similar emulator, it's now illegal to download.

How crap is that? Not that I know anything about this. (¬_¬)

[Herr Matzat]

you cant do nothing with an emulator that has no bios, stealing the bios is illegal. Riping it from your console also is illegal.