Legal Arcade ROM Vendor Talks Business

jvm writes "Remember StarROMs, the company selling legal Atari ROM downloads for a few bucks a piece? They're still around and Curmudgeon Gamer posted an interview with StarROMs co-founder Frank Leibly. Have they been successful so far? How can they possibly expect to compete with free downloads? Are they giving money to MAME as promised? And why has their listing of games dropped from about 60 games to just over 50? It's all here. (Slashdot covered their initial launch late last year, and Slashdot Games recently also recounted a different discussion with Leibly.)"

Comments

mame cabinets

[rohan_leader]

Selling legal roms is a viable business especially when it comes to building mame cabinets, as the article rightly points out.

The ultimate geek builds his own, see CmdrTaco's for an example, but in the future, there might be a market for people who want mame cabinets for sheer nostalgia reasons, as more and more, the computer seems to be in the right position to trump the arcade soon.

And of course, you're not going to put illegal roms on a commercial product. Enter StarROMs...

Re:Increase in liability

[BackwardHatClub]

Not as far as the law is concerned... maybe slightly different if for a jury. But you are no less liable if "everybody is doing it" and no more liable if there are valid alternatives.

Atari still for sale - $18

[JPriest]

I thought this was cool, you can pick up a Joystick with a built in Atari and 10 games for 20 bucks at walmart. Larger picture here

Great reason to support HR2601.

[jbn-o]

ROMs are a great reason to support HR2601 -- the Public Domain Enhancement Act. Copyrighted works that aren't commercially viable stand a chance to enter the public domain after 50 years. If you live in the US, I think you should write you Congressional representatives to co-sponsor this bill.

Re:Great reason to support HR2601.

[10101001 10101001]

Close. It was 14 years plus a 14 year extension possible. I think your talk about the "artists tend to be poorer" is a rather large misconception. For the most part, only people with any significant level of learning could write proficiently enough to author a book. It wasn't until the 19th/20th century that there were folklorists and general widespread literacy improvements that allowed for the poor to write books, so most stories were still told orally for the poor.

During the time between a book starting to be written to the point where sales are enough to live off of, an author needs somewhere to live and eat. There wasn't much of a middle class at the start of the US, so generally that shifts virtually all writers into the comfortably rich. I think all this amounts to most authors of the time having a natural life span around 60 years (ignoring the revolutionary war that shrank writers lives).

However, I don't think that copyright as it was was 14 (+14) years because of the average lifespan of the author. US doctrine doesn't believe the author has any innate right to copyrighted works. In reality, the likelyhood is the 14 (up to 28) year span was more a result of communication lag which could mean it'd take several years before even a popular book to go from one major city to every rich person in even the more rural settings.

Today, it takes literally seconds for most works to go from a major city to a rural setting. While I don't believe a copyright the length of a few days would be sufficient incentive for an author (though it covers news stories well enough), if anything the increase in rate of information transfer should be *decreasing* the length of copyright, not increasing it. The US's adoption of the Berne Convention is to me, an ignorant surrender of a basic ideological difference between given and natural born rights. I truly wish that at some point the US takes measures to reaffirm the basics of what copyright is.

Re:Legitimization

[Troed]

Nintendo cracks down HARD on illegal roms since Nintendo are actively using their old games to further the value of new ones. If there's any one company where "abandonware" really doesn't apply it's Nintendo.

Play Animal Crossing on the Gamecube, and you'll be able to play old NES-games both on the cube - and on your GBA if you have one.

Nintendo has shipped bonusdiscs with both NES and N64 games (Zelda CE) ... lots of GBA games are either remakes or build heavily upon old NES and SNES games.

I do agree with the point that ROMs should be available for legal purchase though. I use a GB Player connected to my Gamecube to play GBA-games, but I'd just as well like to buy a few NES and SNES ROMs from Nintendo and play on my Xbox.

Re:Abandonware grey areas

[Gorath99]

1. If you're willing to pay for those oldies, then just let the owners of the rights know. A number of them have already made their old games available again because of such reactions, either at a small charge or even completely free. This is for instance the case with the various versions of the excellent space sim Elite or the various Cinemaware games such as Defender of the Crown.

2. Leisure Suit Larry was was created and published by Sierra, which obviously still exists. They are even quite fond of releasing old games at low prices or entirely free (the excellent Betrayal at Krondor, for instance).

Legal and not-so-legal emulator cabinets

[AtariKee]

There are a couple of machines manufactured that play classic games via emulation, and I believe that the games themselves are either licensed or no suitable copyright owner could be found. Ultracade is one of them (site requires Flash and is annoying as hell; visit this site for a picture of the cabinet and description). I *believe* that there is another, but I cannot remember the name of it now.

And then there is the venreable ArcadeControls.Com with a hundred or so examples of home-built MAME machines.

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Interview: Frank Leibly of StarROMs
Wednesday, March 31 2004 @ 08:01 AM CST
Contributed by: jvm

Last Fall I interviewed Jeff Vavasour (parts one, two, three) and asked whether we'd ever see any game companies offering game ROMs in a pay-per-download service. Within a matter of days, StarROMs appeared in the public eye and caused a stir by offering several dozen classic Atari arcade ROMs for download, apparently legally, for a couple of dollars each. Shortly thereafter, I purchased several ROMs and enjoyed playing them in MAME, leading to one of the more curmudgeonly, controversial posts to ever grace this site.

Having already poked the ROM pirates with my sawed-off pointy stick, it seemed appropriate to needle the StarROMs people themselves. In the period shortly after their launch, however, StarROMs disappointingly declined my request for an interview. Being the patient type, I asked again recently and this time StarROMs co-founder Frank Leibly agreed to answer my questions.

Here, at last are answers to the big questions: How can StarROMs, a pay-to-download business, really expect to compete with the free, pirated ROMs people are already downloading? Have they been successful? And, are they really going to donate some of their earnings back to emulation projects like MAME?

jvm: Let's get right to the big questions. You've had your business open for nearly five months. Is StarROMs successful so far?

Frank Leibly: I think we're doing pretty good so far. Longer term, we aren't going to be happy until we get every copyright owner on board. And that's going to take some time. But I think we've made a lot of people very happy with what we have to offer now.

jvm: You're charging a couple dollars per game. How can you possibly compete with the "free" downloads of ROMs that any modestly skilled net surfer can track down?

FL: This is really the same issue every copyright owner and media company has been dealing with for years. As a kid I bought blank tapes and copied records and tapes from my friends but when I got to the point when I could afford it I bought the CD's. And I still do. If you look at the demographic of who we're selling to, it's people in their 20's, 30's and 40's for the most part. Spending a few bucks is pocket change and it's worth it to know you're dealing with someone legitimate. I like to think the service we provide is worth something too.

I also think the illegal sites are going to continue to experience pressure and when you get right down to it I'm not sure I see the point of putting up illegal roms if there is a legal source available.

We're also starting to work with some folks who are selling MAME cabinets who want to provide their customers roms legally. These customers are spending big money and they deserve to get something that's fully legitimate rather than pirated.

jvm: There has been some contraction in the catalog of games at StarROMs. I purchased Gauntlet II from you, and it's not listed any more. Could you explain this?

FL: We had a rights issue emerge with respect to ten of the titles we were initially offering, where a third party came along and said that they had rights to these games and that we couldn't sell them without their approval. We hope to offer these games again in the future, but for the time being we agreed to settle this issue amicably by pulling the titles from our offering.

jvm: So, is my license to use Gauntlet II a valid license, even though the game has been removed from your catalog?

FL: Yes, the license is still valid. Likewise, we will continue to provide support for customers who have purchased these games through us, including providing update ROM versions if necessary.

jvm: StarROMs says they'll give a portion of the annual profits to projects that support the emulation of classic games. Some are skeptical about how, or perhaps even whether, this will be done. What does StarROMS have in mind, specifically and when can

Re:If Disney can do it, why can't Sierra?

[pla]

A copy of the entire work is hard to justify as "fair use" in any situation.

I tend to agree, though as someone who understands why software differs from something like a book or a movie, I could also argue the opposite point...

With a book, a one-chapter excerpt can make quite a lot of sense, and give an idea of the feel of the work as a whole. With movies, the actual advertisements just take a set of very short clips and string them together. But with a program? How do you meaningfully use only part of a program? Sure, if you have the source code, you can chop out, say, eight of ten levels in a game. But from just a binary? You just can't do it.

So, although the entire work wouldn't normally count as fair use, with a ROM, you have no choice but to use 100% of it.


If you can show you made some attempt to find the owner, and have an open offer to make an arrangement with them should they contact you, you would probably be reasonably safe.

The very idea of abandonware (at least as defined by the more reputable sites) makes that rather easy - 99% of the games publishers from before the mid 1990's simply don't exist anymore. Tracking down who currently owns the "rights" to the games produced by such companies amounts to a snark hunt, as even if a legal chain of ownership does exist, in many cases, the current owner doesn't even realize it... "Yeah, I worked at Spiffware in 1987 - I designed 8x12 animated blobs that supposedly looked like aliens. What??? As the last surviving programmer who, under a bizarre contract clause, didn't go work for Nintendo, I own their entire catalog, including ZappoBlast 9000? Cool! Uhh... So what do I do with it? I don't even have a single copy of any of those games, though I do have a moldy ZB9k promo poster..."

Now, does that excuse blatant copyright infringement? IMO, as long as the original author/publisher no longer exists, I'd say yes - With the condition, though (as you suggest) that such use include an open offer to the current owner to either stop using it, or to make an arrangement to use it legally. Though, of course, my personal opinion does not carry the weight of law, and various anti-piracy groups regularly crack down on abandonware, despite having no idea themselves as to who can currently claim ownership of such material.