Reporting of illegal rom downloads using RetroPie

[Floob]

There are an increasing amount of sites that offer RetroPie pre-packaged with thousands of copyright games in the download.
Sometimes is a torrent link, mega.nz download or similar. These downloads promote RetroPie as the core function which associates it more and more with copyright games rather than the emulators. Some of these downloads are distributed freely, and others actually charge when hardware is included.

Besides the fact this is illegal in most countries and breaks the licensing agreement, it is profiteering from others work that they contribute for free.

Would there be any mileage in a sticky post that detailed contact methods of the copyright holders of these games? For example, most companies have a process dedicated to logging these sites, especially Nintendo. This would make it a quicker and easier way of doing what we can to prevent this type of activity from proliferating.

Or is it more a case of c'est la vie?

[lilbud]

I personally think that might bring too much negative attention to the RetroPie project. Especially considering Nintendo in how they have been DMCA happy.

[windale]

There are also a few people on e-Bay selling Raspberry Pi packages that include an SD card with RetroPie and 1000's of ROMS pre-installed ! I'm not sure how they get away with this !

[herb_fargus]

@windale I'll tell you how they get away with it: eBay makes their process for take down requests more laborious than necessary so they can take their cuts from the sales. Same with kickstarter, and as soon as one is taken down 3 more take their place. Kodi deals with the same thing on a much broader scale with all the illegal 3rd party addons

[BuZz]

@herb_fargus yep. Amazon too. As you know I took down one sellers retropie sales (with ROMs). The next time I tried Amazon just kept saying they didn't have enough information despite me providing details.

It's unfortunately impossible to stop. People are greedy.

[Floob]

I like the way that when you update RetroPie a splash screen re-appears to remind the user that it is free software.
Perhaps it could be expanded to check for a directory or file that is known to exist on an illegal distribution but never on a legitimate one, i.e certain readme files and/or very specific image assets then if that is found the startup script deletes the ES binary or something.

Its just frustrating that these images are being shared, then people come here to ask for help with the configs.
I appreciate that even the simple install instructions to install RetroPie will be beyond the skills of all users who want to experience retro gaming, but profiteering from others work is pretty poor behaviour.

On an associated topic, perhaps its worth incentivising those who want to support the RetroPie project properly, they could get a membership tag indicating they have donated or similar?

[detron]

@Floob said in Reporting of illegal rom downloads using RetroPie:

On an associated topic, perhaps its worth incentivising those who want to support the RetroPie project properly, they could get a membership tag indicating they have donated or similar?

I like the tag idea, and I am all for supporting RetroPie properly.
also, if RetroPie had a swag shop, I would probably buy items from there too, you know little items such as stickers and lanyards (heck, I would buy ink pens or pencils), or larger items such as maybe a RetroPie custom Raspberry Pi case.

[cyperghost]

@detron said in Reporting of illegal rom downloads using RetroPie:

@Floob said in Reporting of illegal rom downloads using RetroPie:

On an associated topic, perhaps its worth incentivising those who want to support the RetroPie project properly, they could get a membership tag indicating they have donated or similar?

I like the tag idea, and I am all for supporting RetroPie properly.
also, if RetroPie had a swag shop, I would probably buy items from there too, you know little items such as stickers and lanyards (heck, I would buy ink pens or pencils), or larger items such as maybe a RetroPie custom Raspberry Pi case.

That may be the next step to do! Why not sale a "Proved member!" serial number bundeled to the Raspberry Pis unique hardware serial? The key is or can be added to boot/config.txt/in the key ProvedMember=1234567890ABCDEF
So the money is not associated to Libretro or EmulationStation but for RetroPie as forum member.... and then... you can make a SplashScreen like "Please take care about copyright...."

[Zigurana]

We could bake the non-commercial message into the ES splash-screen, which is a codified VSG. This might make it sufficiently difficult for the (lazy) proviteers to remove it.
At the same time, we could have @Rookervik design a new splash screen when entering the system, the old ES one is getting, well, old.

[BuZz]

I don't want any security measures in RetroPie-Setup and I don't think things like that would help (See DRM, and anti piracy stuff in software).

If someone removes the small message we display, so be it - and as RetroPie-Setup is GPL, they can do that.

I mostly just try and ignore those that use RetroPie to make a quick profit. It's not worth the hassle. We can just refuse to support those that are.

We did have a new splash btw, but there were some other things that needed sorting (the fade, so we don't flash back to white with our darker boot splash). Things like this are not a high priority though (for example I have had BBC Micro support on my todo list for some time - and would rather work on that)

[lilbud]

@BuZz Do you mean a darker variant of this?

[BuZz]

Yep. There may have been other changes also. Can't remember.

[HoraceAndSpider]

Hi
Just reading through this, I guess there is no standard “one place” for reporting the RetroPie infringement?

I don’t Know of the team having a FaceBook presence so I would assume this is not related to the project here?

https://www.facebook.com/customisable/

It is just with the use of the logo there it makes it look legit and official, which I even thought it was but then I noticed there were some sales there also, which gave me doubts.

If you have no presence on FB at all, I would recommend you have one, if nothing else just to give users a place to hit “like” before being redirected here!!

[herb_fargus]

@horaceandspider Facebook is rubbish.

They don't respond at all to any requests, perhaps once trademarks are sorted there will be room for recompense.

[HoraceAndSpider]

As I understood the logo etc is all copyrighted now? Surely this might be enough to get pages such as the above taken down?

Whilst I agree it’s no place to have to “proper” presence, I hate to see RetroPie being abused in this way and people pretending to be official when they are not.

[BuZz]

@horaceandspider We don't have the USA trademark sorted yet. Logo is released under a copy left licence, and their usage breaks this (since they are using it in a way to look like us). Not that it matters anyway, since my last reports to facebook went nowhere. After receiving an initial email, my replies with information regarding our licences etc got ignored.

[HoraceAndSpider]

@buzz that’s sad to hear.

Tho guy who appears to be running this page is from the U.K. and posting this on the Retro games forever Group...

Maybe I would care less of the guy was such and obnoxious **** :/