@mesome713 That disclaimer at the start of Televised Sporting Events, as well as on Movies, if you read it carefully, says it is not to be reproduced for Public Exhibition. Mean for the sole use of broadcasting it for other people other than yourself. It does not pertain to personal / private use with no expectation of showing it publicly.
Your argument here is very misguided and twisted. Oh and why I know this ... I used to co-own and run a video rental store back in the day, and we fought this crap, which is why places like netflix and amazon prime are able to thrive now, because we laid the foundation fair use with Video and Video Games within the Rental Space, which also cause the affect that personal use cases for the purpose of backing up their legal owned copies of Movies, and Music, as well as Video Games IS legal.
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Also This:
Section 117 of the Copyright Act allows a user to "copy" the software to the extent of using it on a single computer/console in the sense that you are copying the game data from the disc and that data is being duplicated in the system-- Loading software into a computer's memory, for purposes of infringement analysis, IS copying, even though the resulting "copy" is intangible or electronic; the law obviously makes this form of copying legal.
Beyond the copying permitted in order to use the program on a single computer/console/handheld/etc, Section 117 permits the user to make a copy of the software for backup or archival purposes as a safeguard against damage or destruction.
This is where people get confused, because they think "OK I made a backup of my PS2 discs, now I can play those legally on an emulator without scuffing my original." That is where they are wrong. The backup/archival copy exception is a very narrow limitation relating to a copy being made by the rightful owner of an authentic game to ensure he or she has one in the event of damage or destruction of the authentic. If you have a legal copy of software you are allowed to make a single archival copy of the software for backup purposes. However, the copy can only be used if the original software is destroyed or fails to work. When the original is given away/sold, the backup copy must also be given with the original or destroyed. As for running it on an emulator, you're essentially making a copy of the game in a way that is not authorized --- so the gray area becomes a legal question of whether the "copying" of the game software (ie into the computer, through the emulator software) is an impermissible "copying." That is a question I do not know the answer to, nor do I know if there is legal precedent.
There's another quirk to all this, too, especially in the modern digital/internet world: When you use software, you are granted a license to make "copies" and the terms of that are usually pretty strict. Sometimes that license allows you to run it on multiple computers or accounts if it's like office software; or they allow you to run it on multiple devices through a service like Steam. We can assume that publisher have agreed to allow "copying" software to multiple machines with the caveat that it is only done through 1 account in situations like Steam or XBLA etc. Most of the time though it's far more strict generally speaking.
Certainly downloading a copy of a game someone else made (ie downloading ROMs or ISOs) doesn't come anywhere near the "backup" form of copying. So downloading a ROM or ISO of a game you LEGALLY own and have a copy of is still ILLEGAL. (unless the copyright owner granted permission/license or put their software in public domain etc etc narrow exceptions)
Then you have the DMCA laws; what the DMCA does, through DRM, is make the circumvention illegal, not the actual copying. So now copyright owners can employ DRM; and even if making a "copy" for some thing or another was legal (or not), by circumventing the DRM you are breaking the DMCA. So they gotcha there!
So the laws you are looking for are the US Copyright Act and the DMCA. If you care to pour over thousands of pages of those laws, and thousands more of legal precedent from court cases, you will find... not many helpful answers! Hope that.. helps.
As a side note, I have skipped over the exceptions to copying like fair use, educational purposes/first sale/libraries etc etc, and public domain and expired copyrights.
ALSO I am skipping over the morality question, which is a totally separate topic from the legal question.
Lastly I should say that numerous court cases have determined, after analyzing the Copyright Act, that emulators themselves are legal as long as they don't copy code directly from the source (this is why emulators often come either without a BIOS file [which would have been dumped from the original console and thus an illegal copy] or emulators have their own original non-copied versions of BIOS for the emu). But the gray area becomes whether running a game (ie a copy) through the emulated software is an illegal 'copy.' The answer may lie in the Galoob case, but the thing with law is that just because a preceding case "sort of" answers a question, that doesn't mean that "sort of similar" situations are always OK / not ok.
Comments 1
Re: GC Loader Ditches The GameCube's DVD Drive So You Can Run Games From An SD Card
@mesome713 That disclaimer at the start of Televised Sporting Events, as well as on Movies, if you read it carefully, says it is not to be reproduced for Public Exhibition. Mean for the sole use of broadcasting it for other people other than yourself. It does not pertain to personal / private use with no expectation of showing it publicly.
Your argument here is very misguided and twisted. Oh and why I know this ... I used to co-own and run a video rental store back in the day, and we fought this crap, which is why places like netflix and amazon prime are able to thrive now, because we laid the foundation fair use with Video and Video Games within the Rental Space, which also cause the affect that personal use cases for the purpose of backing up their legal owned copies of Movies, and Music, as well as Video Games IS legal.
=
Also This:
Section 117 of the Copyright Act allows a user to "copy" the software to the extent of using it on a single computer/console in the sense that you are copying the game data from the disc and that data is being duplicated in the system-- Loading software into a computer's memory, for purposes of infringement analysis, IS copying, even though the resulting "copy" is intangible or electronic; the law obviously makes this form of copying legal.
Beyond the copying permitted in order to use the program on a single computer/console/handheld/etc, Section 117 permits the user to make a copy of the software for backup or archival purposes as a safeguard against damage or destruction.
This is where people get confused, because they think "OK I made a backup of my PS2 discs, now I can play those legally on an emulator without scuffing my original." That is where they are wrong. The backup/archival copy exception is a very narrow limitation relating to a copy being made by the rightful owner of an authentic game to ensure he or she has one in the event of damage or destruction of the authentic. If you have a legal copy of software you are allowed to make a single archival copy of the software for backup purposes. However, the copy can only be used if the original software is destroyed or fails to work. When the original is given away/sold, the backup copy must also be given with the original or destroyed. As for running it on an emulator, you're essentially making a copy of the game in a way that is not authorized --- so the gray area becomes a legal question of whether the "copying" of the game software (ie into the computer, through the emulator software) is an impermissible "copying." That is a question I do not know the answer to, nor do I know if there is legal precedent.
There's another quirk to all this, too, especially in the modern digital/internet world: When you use software, you are granted a license to make "copies" and the terms of that are usually pretty strict. Sometimes that license allows you to run it on multiple computers or accounts if it's like office software; or they allow you to run it on multiple devices through a service like Steam. We can assume that publisher have agreed to allow "copying" software to multiple machines with the caveat that it is only done through 1 account in situations like Steam or XBLA etc. Most of the time though it's far more strict generally speaking.
Certainly downloading a copy of a game someone else made (ie downloading ROMs or ISOs) doesn't come anywhere near the "backup" form of copying. So downloading a ROM or ISO of a game you LEGALLY own and have a copy of is still ILLEGAL. (unless the copyright owner granted permission/license or put their software in public domain etc etc narrow exceptions)
Then you have the DMCA laws; what the DMCA does, through DRM, is make the circumvention illegal, not the actual copying. So now copyright owners can employ DRM; and even if making a "copy" for some thing or another was legal (or not), by circumventing the DRM you are breaking the DMCA. So they gotcha there!
So the laws you are looking for are the US Copyright Act and the DMCA. If you care to pour over thousands of pages of those laws, and thousands more of legal precedent from court cases, you will find... not many helpful answers! Hope that.. helps.
As a side note, I have skipped over the exceptions to copying like fair use, educational purposes/first sale/libraries etc etc, and public domain and expired copyrights.
ALSO I am skipping over the morality question, which is a totally separate topic from the legal question.
Lastly I should say that numerous court cases have determined, after analyzing the Copyright Act, that emulators themselves are legal as long as they don't copy code directly from the source (this is why emulators often come either without a BIOS file [which would have been dumped from the original console and thus an illegal copy] or emulators have their own original non-copied versions of BIOS for the emu). But the gray area becomes whether running a game (ie a copy) through the emulated software is an illegal 'copy.' The answer may lie in the Galoob case, but the thing with law is that just because a preceding case "sort of" answers a question, that doesn't mean that "sort of similar" situations are always OK / not ok.