That sentence just jumped out at me, because it's not true. The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) prohibits the use and even the possession of any technology to circumvent any digital "copy protection" (by which they mean "copy prevention") measures of any kind, whether for the purposes of copyright infringement or not. If you break the copy prevention, you are breaking the law."Fair Use" may be a defense for whatever you're actually doing with the content but not for breaking the copy prevention measures in order to do it.

Now, I'm pretty sure that in the case of ROM hacking. many of the games we hack were originally released with chips that were meant to serve as copy prevention measures. This makes any ROM hack based on a ROM of these games a DMCA violation.

However, if we are going to look at reality instead of at legal theory we'd realize that the DMCA doesn't have any real teeth that affects the millions of people (and I'm not just talking about file sharers here) who unknowingly violate it on a daily basis.

(later edit) I replaced the word "protection" with the word "prevention" on purpose because words are powerful things, and for years they have been used by the big corporations to try to convince us that the measures they have been trying to employ to control us are actually there to, in some undefined sense, "protect" us and our rights. Anytime we hear of a "protection" measure, we need to ask who is being protected against what, and whether the word is being used in a politically neutral way. This is why I suggest the term "copy prevention" - you aren't being "protected" against being able to make copies of stuff you've bought - you're being "prevented" and that's all there is to it.

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November 29, 2009, 07:38:15 pm - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)

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LOL, that's nonsense. I don't even see a point in dignifying it with a rebuttal, other than to say that the same argument can be used to justify any form of tyranny. Godwin's law would suggest, "The Jews agreed to be subject to the final solution policies by living in German-occupied territories or by wearing the yellow stars."

(later edit) Wait a minute, I meant that such laws as you describe are themselves nonsense, not necessarily that your explanation of what they say is nonsense.

See, world war happens when people start reading the EULA. Stop reading EULAs now

cYa,

Tauwasser

XD This made my morning! Woo!

It sounds like it is handled differently, but metered dialup is costly, so nobody in their right mind would do that for extended periods.


My guess is that the ones sold on e-bay are those that hold onto the display case version of said game (the ones that ran on the demo consoles in your gaming-electronics store)...

No.

The idea behind patches is that the engine isn't being distributed. The only thing that SE could sue them over is the process of creating the patch (editing the rom), and the patching itself by the user (editing the rom). The final release as a patch should be considered quite legal since by the very nature of patches you are not distributing anything from the original rom.

And that's where we get into gray legal area... :/ Since patches in themselves are harmless but they require a rom (which, ideally, you dumped yourself).