Emulator / Rom legality

Fredthedoggy

I was wondering, is this completely legal to use the emulators and roms or not? I have found nothing stating the legality.

KN4THX

@Fredthedoggy It is illegal to obtain a ROM from any other means than making your own backup for the purpose of safeguarding your games in the event of failure, damage, etc. I suppose if you bought a "classic" system which runs on ROMs you could extract that as well but that may be iffy if there are rules regarding opening or tampering with the system and its functionality or whatnot.

https://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp#download_rom

herb_fargus

@KN4THX Nintendo obviously has biases and it's also subject to local laws and jurisdictions etc etc.

Just please don't steal a bunch of IP, slap retropies name on it and peddle it like the rest of the scumbags out there.

KN4THX

@herb_fargus That's true, and I didn't ask where they were from. I just know the US law as listed in the USC.

barbudreadmon

@Fredthedoggy the emulators are legal, and roms are legal only in those cases :

it's a homebrew
you dumped it yourself
you bought the rom by legal means (i.e if you buy, let's say "sega ages" on steam, which is basically an emulator + its roms iirc, and copy the roms to your retropie)

Fredthedoggy

So since I own a copy of the NES Pacman, im basically fine?

barbudreadmon

@Fredthedoggy said in Emulator / Rom legality:

So since I own a copy of the NES Pacman, im basically fine?

You mean the cartridge ? Only if you dumped it yourself.

Fredthedoggy

@barbudreadmon ok, thanks!

brainfrz

@barbudreadmon said in Emulator / Rom legality:

@Fredthedoggy the emulators are legal

Thats not entirely true, using some emulators require bios files, which are also illegal if you don't get them from original hardware yourself.

That would make the emulator legal on itself, but to be able to use it is another story.

edit: just a little symantic edit as barbudreadmon below is right :)

barbudreadmon

@brainfrz said in Emulator / Rom legality:

Thats not entirely true

Thats entirely true, the emulator is legal in itself, the issue is with external content acquired illegally. Imho saying an emulator is illegal because you can load illegal content with it is exactly the same as saying M$ windows is illegal because you can install cracked software on it.