Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners
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@akafox said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
Did you know in the UK there is a law that says you can’t make a digital copy of something you BOUGHT and PAID for already because the record and movie companies over the said “But when the do that we lose money! There needs to be a law against it!” Because see if they can force you to pay for a physical copy and THEN the digital copy they make more money. If you buy it once then make your own digital they lose money. In other countries that is called extortion.
Actually in October 2014, it became legal to make copies for your own purposes in the UK. Then the music industry got involved after the law was changed and got the law repealed in July 2015. So despite a short time where it was legal, the upshot is you cant even rip a CD that you own on to your computer in the UK without technically breaking the law.
Back on topic, I am going to miss the convenience of Emuparadise, but I already have my own collection. Ultimately, this is more a blow for the casual person who is googling for a rom or wants to get into the scene. I think that Nintendo are aiming to make that difficult enough, they people will just buy a SNES or NES Classic or download a game on Virtual Console on their Switch.
That being said, there is some evidence that Nintendo have in the past used at least one rom from the internet in their Virtual Console games. Super Mario Bros on the Wii Virtual Console was found to have an iNES header which indicated that it had been ripped by someone in the early emulator scene and wasn't produced from the ROM code directly.
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While these sites were highly convenient for singling out missing roms, torrents of entire collections containing thousands or hundreds seem like they dwarf these sites in comparison. There's always a site or technology to rise up when one dies.
Not to get off topic entirely, but reading all of this reminds me of my journey over the years as technology changed and shutdowns occurred:
BBSes->Newsgroups->Warez sites(ftp)->Napster-->Napster clones->edonkey2000/Sharereactor->Modern Times
I used to giggle all night in my bed knowing that my Wacky Wheels or Rise of the Triad shareware was downloading at 9600 baud or 14.4 and might be ready in the morning until I heard my mom on the phone later that night and realized all of my dreams had just be crushed in one ruthless phone call. I will miss you 1994.
"If you're gonna play the Game Boy, You gotta learn to play it right" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYLGl92ETNQ
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@thedatacereal said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
I used to giggle all night in my bed knowing that my Wacky Wheels or Rise of the Triad shareware was downloading at 9600 baud or 14.4 and might be ready in the morning until I heard my mom on the phone later that night and realized all of my dreams had just be crushed in one ruthless phone call. I will miss you 1994.
Ha! I love that and can definitely relate.
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@akafox said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
Why would you want to get Windows and pay for a product that almost works when you can get linux and it's free and almost works?
And yet, Windows dominates the desktop market with approx. 90% whereas Linux remains steadily at approx. 1-2%.
Why do you think Windows 10 is "the last version of windows"?
Windows 10 being "the last version of Windows" just means that Microsoft won't raise its designation number even more, but will just update 10 as a rolling release like certain Linux variants already do for many years now (e.g. Arch Linux).
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I know that everyone that runs this place does a great job of ensuring that no copyrighted content makes it way here or is linked to, but does anybody think there is cause for concern that RP might get shutdown?
None of the sites that have gone away are places that I'm going to miss much personally, but I'll bet there are a lot of people who frequented them that are devastated by this. Not just because of roms being gone, but because a rather large part of their lives just up and disappeared on them. A community they once belonged to is just gone.
I'm hoping that nobody here is that worried about it. Would put my mind a bit at ease.
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@used2berx said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
but does anybody think there is cause for concern that RP might get shutdown?
Oh God, I hope not.
But they really got no reason to shut us down. We provide no roms (well, not us anyway cough ebay sellers cough.) Unless Nintendo wants to get a bug up their ass and go ban hammer happy on any site that has anything to do with emulation.
All those rom sites were places I spent years on when I first started with emulation.
If Nintendo is going to take down these sites, then they better give us a whole alternative, not just a slow drip feed of the same NES games everyone has bought over and over and they keep charging us for.
Some games aren't available elsewhere. And other than paying out the ass to someone on ebay charging $300 for a game like Little Samson, you have no other way to play the game.
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@used2berx said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
does anybody think there is cause for concern that RP might get shutdown?
At this point in time, there's really no reason to be worried.
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AFAIK, regarding USA, emulators are considered as legal by precedence, but of course I'm not a lawyer :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_Inc._v._Connectix_Corp.Video game emulation advocates have asserted that Sony vs. Connectix established the legality of emulators within the United States.
So retropie itself shouldn't be targeted, as long as the project does not provide any content.
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@sano said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
So retropie itself shouldn't be targeted, as long as the project does not provide any content.
Well to any company, us and the bastards who sell Retropie Game Consoles on Ebay are one and the same.
Creator of the Radiocade: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/6077/radiocade
Backlog: http://backloggery.com/lilbud
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@lilbud I wouldn't say we are the same to them. See it this way, they think we are the source. If the RetroPie community wouldn't exist and the software wouldn't be developed, then the grey market couldn't build the devices that easily for free and sell it.
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@sano said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
Video game emulation advocates have asserted that Sony vs. Connectix established the legality of emulators within the United States.
That precedent would likely provide a strong defense, should the matter ever go to court. However, it wouldn't protect anyone from actually going to court. Fighting something like this could potentially take years and more money than most could afford. Big companies know this and often use it as a tool to eliminate smaller advisories. That being said, there's currently no indication that any company is looking to eliminate emulation. I also don't believe there's any reason to think that's going to change, so long as their attention remains where it belongs, with the entities who are actually infringing on their intellectual property.
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@mediamogul Without prying too much - how's it going getting eBay and Amazon to recognize that RPi is yours (as in the RPi team) and you should be able to report and eliminate the idiots using it for profit?
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@classicgmr said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
how's it going getting eBay and Amazon to recognize that RPi is yours (as in the RPi team)
The resolution to the trademark dispute was detailed here. As far as leveraging that for eBay and Amazon misuse, I'm not really sure. I'm certain it'll still be tough, as neither outfit seems to care very much as long as they get their cut of the money. eBay has even begun condoning game piracy to a degree, by creating a specific category dedicated to reproductions. Most aren't even labeled as repros in any way, allowing the buyer to in-turn sell the the games at a higher price to the unsuspecting as legitimate copies.
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@buzz said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
I don't believe that the primary goal of many of these sites is preservation. I suspect making money is the priority. They are all covered in advertising. I don't care at all about these sites being taken down.
You should care. Who will now stop the hordes of people asking for ROMs here? :P
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@matchaman Nintendo, when they find out this has turned into a rom site 😜
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When will Nintendo go after those who sell Raspberry Pis and USBs filled with ROMs on Amazon/EBAY/etc? They are doing way more of a "crime" than these ROMs sites ever do with hosting ROMs with Ads. THese people are literally reselling their IPs are high margins.
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@shizzmoney said in Nintendo's got everyone scurrying for dark corners:
They are doing way more of a "crime" than these ROMs sites ever do with hosting ROMs with Ads. THese people are literally reselling their IPs are high margins.
I completely agree that sellers should be dealt with, but they aren't really on the same level. We can't gauge these sites specifically, but similar ad-driven warez sites brought down in the past were found to pull in thousands of dollars a day easily and sometimes much more. Individual unit sales of pirate game consoles are dwarfed by comparison.
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@shizzmoney As long as we don't know neither of their margins or sales numbers, I think it's impossible to tell who's more criminal than the other. From Nintendo's viewpoint, the amount of distribution could be more important than the profit of the distributor, and a download site might outdo a hardware seller in the number of distributed roms significantly.
edit: @mediamogul beat me to it with more knowledge in the matter. ;)
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