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They can claim something is illegal all they want, but that has no impact whatsoever on the actual legality of it. Anti-consumer EULA/TOS items haven't held up

They can claim something is illegal all they want, but that has no impact whatsoever on the actual legality of it. Anti-consumer EULA/TOS items haven't held up in court for a while now.

slg 9y ago
That isn't a EULA/TOS rule, it is a summary of the law. Can you find any reputable source to disprove what Nintendo says? Here is an independent summary from Tech Radar that agrees with Nintendo. [1] [1] - http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264 http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-lega...
- ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
  Depends on jurisdiction a lot, quite honestly. Nintendo can say it's illegal all it wants, but if I own a physical copy of a game, and make a digital backup of such, then I'm in the clear as far as Canadian law (see our copyright bill C-11) goes. A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original. That being said, if there's DRM and you break it, then you have a different issue entirely. Owning the ROM wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the DRM certainly would be. Even if in the process of legally backing up your data off of the disc you break the DRM, you're still in legal hot waters. Quite frankly I'm convinced Nintendo can say all it wants, it's a scare tactic and for the most part they're full of shit unless you take into account a specific part of US or Japanese law in a specific state or jurisdiction. I would not assume that they know exactly what they're talking about globally.
  - kaoD 9y ago
    Can confirm: my jurisdiction has a clause that allows private copies including (but not limited to) digital backups. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada I'm sorry I couldn't find this article on English Wikipedia.
  - slg 9y ago
    Nothing you said disagrees with anything Nintendo said. You also should note that page is from the Nintendo USA/Canada region website. It isn't trying to explain the situation for every jurisdiction globally.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original." Nintendo: "whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet." Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet". And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.
      - jsgo 9y ago
        no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? Not sure if they could say that you couldn't play the backup directly (as in, that you'd be forced to push it to an official cartridge or disk), but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.
        khedoros1 9y ago
        > no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? I think that's probably true, but it's not what Nintendo is claiming. They claim that the copying devices themselves are illegal to own or use, since the result is a file that can be illegally uploaded and shared, and that as a result, any digital copy that a consumer might create is also illegal, even if kept for personal use. > but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low. Yes, but not terribly exotic. There are EEPROMs that are drop-in replacements, in many cases. So they're also the kinds of chips that you can just connect an EEPROM reader to, to dump the data. Reading the data from the cartridge pins themselves can be a little more complex; I know that the 8-bit Nintendo systems broke their games into swappable sections, with access controlled by a mapper chip. To dump those games from the cartridge connector, one would need to send bank-swapping signals to the chip. The NES had a couple hundred variants of these mapper chips; the Game Boy had about 5 common ones. Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think. I know that people build Arduino-based ROM dumpers. The secret sauce is more in the mapper-handling code than anything else. Newer systems like the Nintendo DS are likely to be less straightforward, but I haven't looked into it that closely.
  - ajnin 9y ago
    There is an important distinction however with regards to exercising the so-called "private copy rights" — at least in the case of European law, I cannot speak about other regions — which is that the source of the data you copy must be licit. Which means that your private copy right allows you to copy the ROM from a cartridge that you bought, but not copy the data from a torrent since (presumably) the uploader had no right to put it there. Post-scriptum : read that for a better understanding of why it matters where the bytes came from, even if they are identical and should make no difference from a computer science point of view : http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
    - pikchurn 9y ago
      That article is a long run-on that doesn't actually provide an argument other than "silly computer scientists are in la la land" name-calling.
- ofcourseianal 9y ago
  Wow, you’re really going wild with the burden of proof. Maybe we should add “Appeal to Nintendo” to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies?
  - slg 9y ago
    Am I going crazy? I provided an honest source for my point. It was pointed out the source I used is likely biased. I therefore provided a second independent source that agreed with the original source. No one has yet provided any source that disagrees with anything I stated or anything stated by either of the sources I linked. And yet is a fallacy for me to ask that someone should have a source if they are going to argue against the two sources I provided?
    - pikchurn 9y ago
      Your source was someone asserting, without justification, that it is illegal. That's not a legal argument. Even without considering that the source is very, very biased, it's not helpful.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
They're right, it isn't legal. The only legal way to acquire a usable ROM in the US is to rip it yourself from a disc/cartridge that you own. That doesn't mean that it's wrong to download ROMs. I've done it. It's just not legal. People are confusing a factual accounting of the law with personal moral condemnation.

They can claim something is illegal all they want, but that has no impact whatsoever on the actual legality of it. Anti-consumer EULA/TOS items haven't held up in court for a while now.

slg 9y ago

That isn't a EULA/TOS rule, it is a summary of the law. Can you find any reputable source to disprove what Nintendo says? Here is an independent summary from Tech Radar that agrees with Nintendo. [1] [1] - http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264 http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-lega...

ThatGeoGuy 9y ago
Depends on jurisdiction a lot, quite honestly. Nintendo can say it's illegal all it wants, but if I own a physical copy of a game, and make a digital backup of such, then I'm in the clear as far as Canadian law (see our copyright bill C-11) goes. A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original. That being said, if there's DRM and you break it, then you have a different issue entirely. Owning the ROM wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the DRM certainly would be. Even if in the process of legally backing up your data off of the disc you break the DRM, you're still in legal hot waters. Quite frankly I'm convinced Nintendo can say all it wants, it's a scare tactic and for the most part they're full of shit unless you take into account a specific part of US or Japanese law in a specific state or jurisdiction. I would not assume that they know exactly what they're talking about globally.
- kaoD 9y ago
  Can confirm: my jurisdiction has a clause that allows private copies including (but not limited to) digital backups. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada I'm sorry I couldn't find this article on English Wikipedia.
- slg 9y ago
  Nothing you said disagrees with anything Nintendo said. You also should note that page is from the Nintendo USA/Canada region website. It isn't trying to explain the situation for every jurisdiction globally.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original." Nintendo: "whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet." Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet". And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.
    - jsgo 9y ago
      no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? Not sure if they could say that you couldn't play the backup directly (as in, that you'd be forced to push it to an official cartridge or disk), but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.
      - khedoros1 9y ago
        > no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? I think that's probably true, but it's not what Nintendo is claiming. They claim that the copying devices themselves are illegal to own or use, since the result is a file that can be illegally uploaded and shared, and that as a result, any digital copy that a consumer might create is also illegal, even if kept for personal use. > but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low. Yes, but not terribly exotic. There are EEPROMs that are drop-in replacements, in many cases. So they're also the kinds of chips that you can just connect an EEPROM reader to, to dump the data. Reading the data from the cartridge pins themselves can be a little more complex; I know that the 8-bit Nintendo systems broke their games into swappable sections, with access controlled by a mapper chip. To dump those games from the cartridge connector, one would need to send bank-swapping signals to the chip. The NES had a couple hundred variants of these mapper chips; the Game Boy had about 5 common ones. Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think. I know that people build Arduino-based ROM dumpers. The secret sauce is more in the mapper-handling code than anything else. Newer systems like the Nintendo DS are likely to be less straightforward, but I haven't looked into it that closely.
- ajnin 9y ago
  There is an important distinction however with regards to exercising the so-called "private copy rights" — at least in the case of European law, I cannot speak about other regions — which is that the source of the data you copy must be licit. Which means that your private copy right allows you to copy the ROM from a cartridge that you bought, but not copy the data from a torrent since (presumably) the uploader had no right to put it there. Post-scriptum : read that for a better understanding of why it matters where the bytes came from, even if they are identical and should make no difference from a computer science point of view : http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - pikchurn 9y ago
    That article is a long run-on that doesn't actually provide an argument other than "silly computer scientists are in la la land" name-calling.
ofcourseianal 9y ago
Wow, you’re really going wild with the burden of proof. Maybe we should add “Appeal to Nintendo” to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies?
- slg 9y ago
  Am I going crazy? I provided an honest source for my point. It was pointed out the source I used is likely biased. I therefore provided a second independent source that agreed with the original source. No one has yet provided any source that disagrees with anything I stated or anything stated by either of the sources I linked. And yet is a fallacy for me to ask that someone should have a source if they are going to argue against the two sources I provided?
  - pikchurn 9y ago
    Your source was someone asserting, without justification, that it is illegal. That's not a legal argument. Even without considering that the source is very, very biased, it's not helpful.

PhasmaFelis 9y ago

They're right, it isn't legal. The only legal way to acquire a usable ROM in the US is to rip it yourself from a disc/cartridge that you own. That doesn't mean that it's wrong to download ROMs. I've done it. It's just not legal. People are confusing a factual accounting of the law with personal moral condemnation.