Posted by Dave Isreal on 27, 2001 at 7:45 PM:
In Reply to: Legal question: Do broken/non-working boards count? posted by NThero on 27, 2001 at 1:44 AM:
: Just curious... Do broken or non working arcade machines or boards or romchips give a person the legal right to use the ROMs with an emulator?
: Which part of the original machine do you need to be legally entitled to download the ROMs? If you buy a working machine, do you lose the right when it breaks? What if I buy a broken machine to start with?
Good question - I don't know for sure, but that game board worked at one point, and was a recognized, licensed copy of the copyrighted game info. Unless it had been subsequently replaced (say that it stopped working in the original game when an arcade owner owned it and the arcade vendor replaced it under warranty) and declared void by its manufacturer, I would think it was still a single, duly-licensed (legit) copy of the game.
To those who would disagree, consider this: what if you took a non-working board and reflowed solder into all the connections and got it to work again? Would you say it was only legit now that it's functional, and it wasn't before you fixed it? That's not as logically consistent as saying it was *always* a legit copy of the game and simply didn't work at some point. After all, the owner of an arcade doesn't lose the license to a game when it ceases to function...it simply doesn't work until he fixes it.
I visited anti-piracy sites, but they don't address this very specific question very well, except to say that a legit piece of copyrighted material can only be used in one place at one time, unless you have some sort of site license or group license agreement. Well, if I have a game board that was never declared void by its manufacturer, regardless of whether it works at the moment, I think I would have a single-use right to it - say, a right to play one copy of it on a single emulator machine.
Then again, as the game boards trade hands, who really owns the rights to them anymore? If you buy one on e-bay, you're certainly not giving the manufacturer compensation for his intellectual property - you're probably not even dealing with the guy who bought it from the manufacturer when it entered the market. Still, I'd argue that the person holding the board has a single-use right to the ROM info, whether the board was working or not...
Dave Isreal