Ask Slashdot: Where Can I Buy Legal Game ROMs?

PktLoss writes "I'm interested in building an arcade machine, following the footsteps of Cmdr Taco among many others. Not being all that interested in piracy, I need to find somewhere to buy games. StarROMs used to be the kind of thing I was looking for, though with an incredibly short catalog. The MAME people have a few available for free (non-commercial), but this isn't going to sate my needs. There's an entire cottage industry supporting this goal. People are ready to sell me plans, kits, buttons, joy sticks, glass marquees, and entire machines. That's fantastic, but where can I get the games? I refuse to believe that this entire industry is built on piracy."

Comments

The entire industry is built on piracy

[YesIAmAScript]

EOM

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[somersault]

Yeah. Asking a question and ending with "I refuse to believe the truth!" isn't the best way to go.

If these are ancient games, and there is no other way to get them, then they're "abandonware". Just grow a pair and download them. It might be illegal, but I don't see how it's immoral. If the company that made the game is even still around, you could try contacting them for a license as AC suggested.

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[somersault]

By which time you will be dead..

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[Samantha Wright]

As will your children. And possibly your grandchildren.

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[greg1104]

The reason piracy is the rule here is that it's almost impossible for a single home user to acquire the rights to use these ROMs. There are a few game vendors who have packaged up their ROM files to sell in that form. But those aren't normally aimed at an individual to buy; they're only packaged as a set of raw ROM files ffor resale as part of something else.

If you buy a fully legitimate arcade console with licensed games, what they will typically do is negotiate licenses to several sets of these packaged games from multiple manufacturers. For example, X-Arcade Machine includes 205 licensed games, for the most part collections such as Namco Muesum and Midway Arcade Treasure's Titles where the manufacturer has gone to the trouble of packaging the game ROMs for distribution--and therefore licensing. (Note that the quality of the joystick and buttons used in the X-Arcade hardware is considered low compared to what most DIY consoles aim for; don't consider the above a recommendation for buying one of them, they're just a good example here)

Packages such as Namco Muesum are available to buy on a wide variety of platforms. When you buy those, you're not directly given the ROMs though; you just get the right to play them as they are packaged for that platform. What I do to try and keep myself morally clean here is purchase any such collection that's available for the games I play on MAME.

I buy these collections, I bought all of the games I liked from StarROMs when they were available. But the ROMs I play on MAME, those are coming from the bootleg distributions; like a lot of things, the pirates provide the easiest to use packaging of the software. Until companies like Namco and Atari start selling ROM licenses directly, I don't know that it's possible to be legally clean here, unless you buy one of the packaged cabinets from a manufacturer who is big enough to have negotiated a resale license.

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[Bert64]

Which is a waste of time, copyright terms are unrealistically long so anyone who remembers these games will be long dead by the time they fall into the public domain.

Just goes to show that copyright terms are far too long. Anything that falls into the public domain will be long forgotten. Media should fall into the public domain once the original authors stop selling it.

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[couchslug]

Always remember that law is not more or less than an arrangement of convenience for maintaining social order.

We choose which laws we obey based on the cost/benefit perception we have of the results.

Don't act as if law is sacred and that all law should be obeyed because it's "law".

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[dgatwood]

No, there should be a registration requirement, without which you cannot claim damages, and you should be required to update that registration in a timely manner. You know, like the way things used to work before we went all Berne-Convention-y in the 1970s.

The burden should be upon the copyright owner to facilitate contact by potential licensees, not on the potential licensee. After all, it is the copyright owner who stands to gain, not the licensee (who could almost invariably just ignore the copyright, and the licensor would never know).

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[DavidTC]

This.

There is a valid argument for saying 'People should not have to pay to register every single thing.'. But the fact is, at this point in time, there's absolutely no reason why anyone should have to pay just in case.

The government could simply have a website and hand out unique IDs whenever anyone wanted. You produce something you suspect might be worth copyrighting, you get a unique ID for that thing for free and stick it in the copyright notice.

Then you have three years to actually fill out a copyright registration for that ID and pay $25 or whatever, or it's considered abandoned and thus public domain.

That seems to get rid of any of the so-called reasons we started issuing copyrights automatically. It gives people plenty of time to see if the registration is worthwhile, it helps people who might not have thought that specific thing was worthwhile, yet doesn't result in every single damn thing ever written being copyrighted.

Likewise, if someone attempts to contact the person listed, and they can not be reached, they should be able to send a notice to the copyright office, which will then mail an official letter giving them a year to fix their registration, or it's public domain. Any idiot can type in the unique ID and see the copyright status, and where to send the info to. (We could even charge people for questioning the status. You try to contact a copyright holder, you can't, you pay $1 to have the copyright office send an official postage-paid letter that they are require to respond to.)

And we need to go through the older stuff and slowly start requiring that done to them, also. The older stuff actually _does_ have registration, as you pointed out....but we need to put the contact information online, so we can say 'Hey, those people don't exist', and get the copyright office to remove the copyright after a year or so.

As for the newer stuff, that's harder to figure out, but I think giving people ten years or so to locate it and register it would be reasonable.

Re:The entire industry is built on piracy

[AmiMoJo]

And so will the ROM. Early arcade ROMs are already becoming unreadable due to bit rot. Some companies (Sega) even installed "suicide batteries" that wipe a necessary encryption key when the battery goes flat, and typical battery life was less than 10 years.

Some modern games require a network connection so they can download an encryption key. Once those servers are turned off the game will be lost forever unless someone manages to find the key. DRM is ensuring the loss of our cultural heritage.

From who?

[TerminaMorte]

Who would you be buying it from? In most cases you'd just be buying a shady company for a pirated ROM regardless. Most of the companies that made these games no longer exist. Any IP is going to be owned by a large corp like Nintendo, who will want you to buy their console and not DIY You are saying you do not want to pirate, while at the same time you want to use this content in an un-authorized/un-approved way. Piracy is your only real option if you want to play "popular" game ROMs.

Re:From who?

[Anonymous Coward]

The most entertaining part of this whole discussion is we're talking about games made in the 80's and 90's.

Whatever happened to the Public Domain? Or have we all forgotten, since there's basically nobody alive who's really experienced works in the public domain, that THE ENTIRE POINT OF COPYRIGHT IS TO ENRICH the public domain?

There are those who argue the age-old publishers cry "we need to protect scientific and cultural advancement" I say, without the public domain, there's no incentive not to reproduce the same things that were in the past, or not to sit on your hides renting technology. Such hypocrisy; to build off the technology of the past in order to monopolize the present. Publishers will never stop arguing "longer longer" and the people, well, they're the only reasonable one in the discussion.

Sony doesn't want you buying FF7 for the same reason Best Buy doesn't want a Sony TV on their shelves that is more than a year old. They don't want to dissuade your dollars from buying the new shiney. Although I do have to ask what kind of market it would be, especially for gaming, if the current cookie cutters had to compete with the old cookie cutters.

  I say, if there's works created in my lifetime will never enter into the public domain, then there is no point in participating in copyright.

Re:From who?

[Moryath]

Thanks to Disney and the corrupt shills that have taken over the government, games made in the 1980s won't "expire copyright" and return to the public domain until sometime after 2100. If there isn't yet ANOTHER "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" copyright extension passed in the meantime.

Part of the problem is that copyright doesn't take into account the life of the medium any more. Imagine what happens when most books are only available on e-readers and most e-readers no longer read the format the book was put out in (not so hard to imagine: think of some of the books that only exist on B&N Nook format and imagine that B&N goes under and nobody bothers to code a translator because "well most of it is on Kindle anyways", followed by B&N's servers shutting down and nobody having a remaining copy of the book anywhere).

The longer copyright terms are, the more information we LOSE to bad circumstances and bitrot. For one of the most famous cases, consider the missing episodes of Dr. Who - the BBC now has a comparatively huge bounty out for anyone who has them, even if it's a really crappy telecine.

Re:From who?

[Smallpond]

This raises an interesting legal question. If I have a copy of a missing TV show episode, what claim would the copyright owner have if they don't have a copy? If I distribute it I'm violating the copyright. But I'm not taking anything from the owner because they can't do the same. The whole point of copyright is to preserve the right to distribute for the owners. In particular, it's NOT to prevent old episodes from being watched so that people will watch new episodes. Copyright is only for protecting that work, not other works using the same trademarks or characters.

Re:From who?

[jedidiah]

The idea of abandonment comes up because some of us rightly point out that this concept exists for real property. So when we see people try to conflate creative works with real property, we bring this idea into the discussion. Media moguls want all of the upside of property as a natural right but none of the possible downsides of it of course.

So things like taxes and squatting are left for the rest of us to consider.

not going to find it

[Trepidity]

The only real non-pirate way to get a significant number of ROMs is to buy the physical games and the equipment to image a ROM from them.

A few university libraries have started digitally preserving culturally significant games, and that's what they end up doing, because they can't really pirate the ROMs, yet can't buy legitimate digital copies either.

Re:not going to find it

[Trepidity]

If you legitimately own a copy on some medium, medium-shifting to another one is legal, just like you can rip your own music CDs to mp3s.

Re:not going to find it

[davester666]

It depends entirely upon the patch of ground you happen to be standing on and the relative quality of your lawyers as to whether it is or is not "legal".

Re:not going to find it

[mysidia]

DMCA. Repeat after me, DMCA. The fact arcade games are in proprietary ROMs or even soldered to the mobo, you removing them to "archive" or medium shift, it illegal in the US

Except that an Exception to the DMCA was made:

37 CFR 201.40 Exemption to prohibition against circumvention

1. Compilations consisting of lists of Internet locations blocked by commercially marketed filtering software [...]
2. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. [...]
3. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling of the ebook's read-aloud function and that prevent the enabling of screen readers to render the text into a specialized format.

Re:not going to find it

[crankyspice]

If you legitimately own a copy on some medium, medium-shifting to another one is legal, just like you can rip your own music CDs to mp3s.

Incorrect, at least under U.S. copyright law. RIAA v. Diamond, 98-56727 (9th Cir., June 15, 1999) (http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1054784.html), the seminal case on the issue, found a fair use in "space shifting" music to MP3 players, but did so under the auspices of the Audio Home Recording Act (http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap10.html), which carves out specific exemptions applicable to sound recordings. No such provision(s) exist for video game ROMs, in any jurisdiction I'm aware of.

What is this "piracy?"

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Keep in mind that every unofficial copy of a protected work isn't necessarily copyright violation. Look up fair use, and consult a lawyer for its application to a given field. You can also ask that the library of Congress put a DMCA exemption on a particular use, IIRC, although that would be more for the field than for your personal use.

http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding-press-release-DMCA-EXEMPTION

Re:What is this "piracy?"

[jonbryce]

You have to buy a legitimate copy of the ROM, and then you can maybe exercise your fair use rights to format-shift it. However finding a legitimate copy is going to be pretty difficult, and I guess ebay is pretty much the only option.

Re:What is this "piracy?"

[SuricouRaven]

Fair use is a defence. It doesn't come into play until after lawyers are hired and court is attended. A DMCA exemption also doesn't automatically make something legal - it's only an exemption from the DMCA, not plain old-fashioned copyright law.

Re:I am not a lawyer, but...

[Stormthirst]

If you are using the backup for something other than as a backup, then it's not a backup.

Depending on which country you are in, however, you might be permitted to format shift. The UK that's not legal, even though everyone (and probably their grandmother) is format shifting their CDs into MP3s these days. The UK government have started looking at this ridiculous position with a view to changing the law. Lets hope they have an attack of sense, and decide that because 90% of the population are doing it, that democracy should prevail and legalise it. Especially considering I've never heard anyone being prosecuted for ripping their CDs, ever.

Virtual Console...

[Windwraith]

That's the whole idea behind them, selling you ROMs and a license to use them.

Re:ROM Marketplace?

[Anonymous Coward]

ROMs don't automatically mean emulator. ROMs aren't illegal. Please, quit this thinking.
And on that topic, emulators aren't illegal either. Not even in the most retarded countries when it comes to IP law.
Companies want you to THINK it is illegal (like the recent Atari who still think they hold control over the Atari trademark), but it isn't.

If you want actual games from companies, you are going to have to go through a strict process with the developers of those games, be it Nintendo or some random company.
You have to get a licence. You get the game, quite literally in ROM modules form sometimes, you plug it in to your hardware that they have to inspect and approve of (or a 3rd party approval process who manages the arcade cabinet industry members), and that is it.
Note the hard, strict, and additionally that you'll likely not be approved if it is for personal use unless you offer to pay out of the ass.

How do I dumped cartridge?

[tepples]

i don't see a problem with buying the game on a cart at your local store ( be it new or used ) then copying the data off to use in your emulator.

This would appear to be legal under 17 USC 117(a)(1). But good luck finding the copier tools to extract the data from the cartridges. A Nintendo DS or DS Lite with a flash card can dump Game Boy Advance cartridges, but that's about it. For Sega Genesis and Super NES, there was the Retrode, but that's sold out. For NES, there's the Kazzo, but that's hand-assembled in extremely low volumes and apparently not intended for sale to the casual gamer.