emulation in shops
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hi people, a bi off topic so i hope its allowed! i have a computer repair shop and i'm a games collector too. i have a mame machine built and a few lcd screens hooked up to raspberry pi's with megadrive games etc around the shop that i let people play for free while i do repairs. it got me thinking on the laws on this. what is the laws on emulation if im not charging to play these games. for example if i had a cafe, or pub with these in... is this illegal?
thanks
mathew -
@mat03111984 you'd have to get a definitive answer from a lawyer but as far as I understand it games are licensed so to have an arcade you'd need a license for others to play just as much as you need a license of sorts to show movies publicly
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A friend told me about a local bar that lets people rent oldschool consoles with flashcarts full of ROMs, so in practice this kind of thing probably happens all the time.
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yeah i read so many different things on the law. i know Nintendo say all roms are illegal on their website. but i dont see why, if i own mario kart and mario 64 and i use a frontend and roms so people can choose which game to play instead of me swapping the carts over all the time why that would be illegal
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@mat03111984 said in emulation in shops:
instead of me swapping the carts over all the time why that would be illegal
Ah, but that's just it. Even using carts as you describe here would put yourself in a potentially actionable position, as you would be making the games available for public consumption as part of your own commercial endeavors. In six degrees of Kevin Bacon, you've established a public arcade of sorts, as @herb_fargus mentioned above.
The Walt Disney company has representatives traveling all over the United States, visiting preschools where they look for any objectionable copyright violations such as hand-painted murals depicting their characters. They're pretty gentle about the whole thing; offering many solutions that require no money to be paid to keep things nice and legal. The MUSAC corporation, on the other hand, has representatives charged with the same task; visiting restaurants and bars, looking for unlicensed public music presentations, but their practices are more akin to a protection racket. They make claims that if the activity doesn't stop or that if the business owner doesn't purchase a MUSAC licensed music player, they will begin immediate legal action.
There is also the odd occurrence of a customer turning a business in, but most people wouldn't even take the time to research where to send the claim, let alone follow through with it. All this said, could something similar happen to you? Well, anything is always possible and someday the video game industry may start aggressively protecting their content from public consumption in this way, but for right now, I'd say the chances are slim to none. However, if you're really concerned about it, you should definitely consult an attorney.
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@mediamogul ok awesome. thanks. its crazy really, i just love to show off games and people come in and tell me all about what they loved when they were young. such a shame that there not a place where people can relive them for free
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@mat03111984 said in emulation in shops:
such a shame that there not a place where people can relive them for free
Weeelll, when you put it like that, I am reminded of an exception, should you happen to live in the United States. A certain website was granted exemption from the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act and is allowed to possess and even cache games to be played directly from a browser. You can also download games and even whole collections of games without worry of violating copy protection, so long as you don't redistribute the games, or make them available for public play afterward.
So, as it currently stands, if your business resides in the US and you offered up the ability to play the games via their web-based cache format, I don't believe any laws would be broken at all. This would effectively allow a makeshift internet arcade to exist where people could gather to relive these games for free, legally. What's more is that when Kodi v18 is released with their RetroPlayer media layer, an addon will also be available to stream and scrape these games from the website, allowing an almost unlimited game library to be searched, browsed and played as if they all existed on your system without the need to take up any significant local storage space.
All in all, it really is a great time to be a retro-gamer.
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