ROM prosecution (freakin' ESSAY below)


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Posted by Claw919 on 10, 2001 at 5:07 PM:

In Reply to: Uhh... ok, what I was trying to write was... posted by Matthew C. Waterman on 9, 2001 at 3:27 PM:

Actually, the companies have basically decided to look the other way. See, if you don't protect the trademarks you own, you can lose them (by demonstrating that you didn't make a reasonable effort to protect them). By "not noticing", the companies can say that they never ALLOWED the practice to take place.

In other words, if you e-mail Atari's lawyers saying "Whew! Thanks for not busting me on my 5,000 ROMSET Centipede cabinet!!!", they'll bust you.

It also threatens development of MAME. I, for one, wouldn't contribute to a project where I am likely to be sued. And yes - companies can and have sued the developers of emulation software. Check out UltraHLE (non-commercial), Bleem! (commercial), and Snes9x (Non-commercial) for examples. No, the authors of UltraHLE and Snes9x ended up NOT being sued, but the threat hung pretty heavy over them both - including letters exchanged and they were both forced to seek legal counsel ($$).

Finally, nice posting under new nicks on the board. Bloody cowards. "I'm a l33t software d00d - and you can't bust me.". Signed - 'Coolromguy'. (Aka - some other alias on the board, I'm sure).

All that being said, there are 3 kinds of people who use MAME:

1) The religious zealots. The people who don't (REALLY!) download any romsets they aren't entitled to (don't own the PCB for it). Few and far between, these users actually use MAME for its intended (stated) purpose.

2) The masses. We don't REALLY own the 10-15 ROMsets that we use with MAME, but they were our real, honest-to-god favourites so we play them. We might even build a cabinet and put a PC in there just because we like those classics so much. We don't go around bragging about our 'l33t d00d' piracy, nor do we like talking about HOW we got our ROMS. We actually looked for them, got them, and shut up about it. We'd never dream of selling them for profit. We're the ones the companies look away from.

3) The scum-suckers. They download EVERYTHING they can find, burn it on a CD (since they don't want to waste that amount of time again), play 15% of the games (those lame '80s ones didn't have NEARLY the graphx as "Super Ultra Virtua Kombat Fighter" anyhow), and then we brag about it. Some of us offer them for sale on Ebay (since we spent so much time downloading them with Daddy's cable modem, and that was boring, so it must have been work). We make big, proud boasts on websites to "Come get us, man!", and will always share URLs of download sites so EVERYONE can leech like us. We don't actually UPLOAD any ourselves, of course - we found them, so they can too! (actually, we begged the URL from someone who finally gave it to us so we'd go away). We really only play the Neo-Geo games. Not that anything is inherently WRONG with Neo-Geo games, but they just appeal more to our personalities. Big, flashy graphics and nice sound. Not like Mario Brothers or Galaga - who wrote THOSE pieces of crap, anyhow?

Oh - and we complain how MAME is slow and doesn't emulate games like Virtua Fighter and things like that.

And we think it's a TRAVESTY that high-bandwidth sites aren't allowed to put all ROMsets into one large file. Where's the justice in having to click 2,800 times?!?!

*Sigh* - enough. I honestly could go on for another 5000 pages about this, but I won't. As a software developer, and as a fan of the true hard (thankless) work that the people who write MAME drivers really put in, I think we owe it to them not to make it into a catalyst for piracy. There will always be Type 3's out there who screw everything up for the rest of us, but hopefully they'll remain the minority.

Claw919


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