The touchy subject of...roms

As far as the law is concerned, ROMs (of the variety most people are referring to) are illegal in any situation, there's no question about it.

As for its effects, it's probably minimal, as people who pirate ROMs most likely wouldn't or couldn't buy the game anyway.

Morally, I think that if the game is readily available for purchase in your area, it's also wrong. You can't just get something you're not supposed to get without paying for it.

Originally Posted by Phazon goron

Real artists don't need money for there work.

Yeah who needs a job doing something you love
Not me
I just like spending all of my energy and time making things that use up time I could be working a REAL job with and not making any money
Yep

I also wanted to add the use of ROMs can be preferable to your actual copies
due to superior graphics, and that ROMs allow you to do fast forward/rewind cheats

Originally Posted by Phazon goron

Real artists don't need money for there work.

Yes they do, because money is needed for essential things like food and shelter. Why do some people consider it evil that video game creators want money for their work? Just because they want to get paid doesn't also mean they don't care about their consumers.

Indeed some might even take it as an insult that pirates like their work enough to pirate it, but don't care about it enough to pay for it.

Originally Posted by TalAarahk

Yes they do, because money is needed for essential things like food and shelter. Why do some people consider it evil that video game creators want money for their work? Just because they want to get paid doesn't also mean they don't care about their consumers.

Indeed some might even take it as an insult that pirates like their work enough to pirate it, but don't care about it enough to pay for it.

It's a common assumption that pirates don't pay for games, or the content they pirate. Why would you assume that's always the case?

I mean, I wouldn't pay for a game if:
-I try it out and it sucks, in which case I would uninstall it
-I try it out and it wont run on my machine, in which case I sadly uninstall it
-It's 6 years old or older
-paying for the game means terrible DRM, where as pirating means no DRM, or the developer/producer/publisher is taking some sort of other action which effects their users or workers which I strongly disagree with.
-I can't find the game in my region, or I have to jump through hoops to get the game
-The game is going on a communal machine, in say, a computer lab, or a shared LAN party computer. (Thus, it plays more like a demo anyway.)
-I've already bought the game before (For example, I bought Civ 4, but I lost the disks, so I pirated it.)

In some of those cases, I would feel like I had disregarded my morals if I paid for the game, and in others it just wouldn't make sense.

In pretty much any other case, though, I will pay full price for a game.

Originally Posted by Phazon goron

Real artists don't need money for there work.

While I'd prefer that everyone release their art and other software as free software, but that's not really something you can expect of someone, especially when it comes to art.

As we are, we need money to continue living, unfortunately, and while some artists such as Johnathan Coultan and MC Frontalot might release their art via copyleft licenses such as GNUGPL or CC, and that's something we should encourage, we shouldn't be offended by those who decide they want to make money through means other than donations and ads.

As much as I'm a free software guy, and I respect Stallman, I'm not in the same mind as him, as I don't think we should restrict ourselves to only using free software. If we want free software to grow as both a moral standard and a popular model as it produces a better product, we need to allow it to mix with proprietary software in order to first allow it to grow in popularity.

I was introduced to the world of Roms when my Snes died. I got roms of all my games, and I can see that it would be very tempting to get roms of games that you don't own. I don't see a problem with getting roms of old generation games; the companies that made them are no longer getting money out of them, and sometimes Roms may be the only way for some old classics to survive.

If anyone believes that artists and game companies don't need money, you are sadly mistaken.
Situation:

Hey, guys! We made our first album! It cost 300,000 to make after all the costs were tallied, and the company takes a 30% cut of sales.

Do you realize how much they have to sell just to break even?
A lot. The total production costs are huge, and the artist has to pay back the company that covered the costs. They need that money.

Dumping Roms isn't illegal.

Originally Posted by Phazon goron

Dumping Roms isn't illegal.

Oh yes it is.
It's illegal to make a "backup" or "archival" copy of the data.
If you dump a ROM, it's illegal.

You cannot prevent the creation of roms.

They exist because the actual games do. To make roms non existent, you need to make games non existent.

Originally Posted by Anann

You cannot prevent the creation of roms.

They exist because the actual games do. To make roms non existent, you need to make games non existent.

We are not talking about the creation of ROMs. We're talking about the copying and downloading of ROMs.

Originally Posted by Anann

You cannot prevent the creation of roms.

They exist because the actual games do. To make roms non existent, you need to make games non existent.

It's not about stopping people from creating them, it's about the legality of doing so.

It's sort of like limewire, it's not illegal to have limewire, but it is illegal to download a movie, or a song from limewire.

I guess there's really nothing that you can do about it.

Originally Posted by Lord Zero

It's not about stopping people from creating them, it's about the legality of doing so.

No, no, she was trying to point out that ROMs are, in fact, the data contained within a game (at least, the read-only memory), so ROMs are the games themselves. But we're just talking about people copying those ROMs from the original games, which is the illegal part.

Legal ROMs do exist-- people can create their own completely original ROMs that could run on SNES emulators, for example.

ROM: Read only memory.

Originally Posted by Phazon goron

ROM: Read only memory.

And suddenly that makes sense.

Originally Posted by LinksShadow66

It's sort of like limewire, it's not illegal to have limewire, but it is illegal to download a movie, or a song from limewire.

It should be illegal to use Limewire, if only because you're using ****ty software to regulate a ****ty protocol, with ****ty users.