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Is there a legal way to acquire ROMs of old games or are torrents the only practical way?
by gotoeleven 4y ago
Is there a legal way to acquire ROMs of old games or are torrents the only practical way?
- theshrike79 4y agoYou could buy the game and dump the ROM yourself. You also need to get the original console and dump the BIOS from it. Nobody does it, torrents are the way people actually do it. Nevermind that people would actually pay money to have legal, licensed, digital copies of both - but the game companies don't care or want the money.
- linuxftw 4y agoNintendo does release older software from time to time, at least 1st party titles. Especially on their virtual consoles.
- skyyler 4y agoThey don't do that anymore. They offer subscriptions to curated lists of games. You used to be able to purchase old games from Nintendo, but now you can't. (At least on the Switch)
- charcircuit 4y agoThat is not necessarily legal. Nintendo's lawyers for example have the view that a copy made dumping one of their games is a copy that violates Nintendo's copyright.
- smoldesu 4y agoIn the United States, that view doesn't have legal precedent. It could be argued, but in the past American courts tend to rule in favor of the personal freedom to archive software. Emulators have gotten a protective shield ever since the Bleem! lawsuit, and ripping physical media is a practice grandfathered in to the ownership of digital paraphernalia. You're correct to highlight that it's not explicitly legal/illegal, but at least in America things are pretty cut-and-dried.
- 0xcde4c3db 4y agoIt's been a while, but ISTR that their argument was essentially that backup or archival copies are unnecessary due to the reliability of their media and hardware, therefore any purported backup or archival copies must actually be for an infringing purpose. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure there's no "unless the copyright owner or an affiliated party claims you don't need to" clause in the backup/archival exceptions.
- tadfisher 4y agoFor other media, format-shifting does have precedent; MP3 players survived the RIAA, for instance. I don't see a meaningful difference for software.
- 0xcde4c3db 4y agoWhile I'm ill-equipped to properly analyze that comparison, I'd generally be wary of generalizing from rulings about music recordings, which get special treatment under US copyright law. They're even represented by a distinct category, "phonorecords", explicitly excluded from the definition of "copies".
- rowanG077 4y agoFortunately what Nintendo thinks has no legal impact.
- theshrike79 4y agoNintendo is second only to The Mouse in being hypersensitive to copyright stuff.
- HideousKojima 4y agoThe Genesis/MegaDrive collection games on Steam include the roms.