what are legal rights about Rom sites. Plenty have been around for years. Some have even been around for over 5 years with thousands of thousands of Roms and havnt been shut down. Is this legal or illegal or in the grey area.
It depends on the content of the roms. Rom files for older games are usualy not legal unless the developer allowed you to distribute the file.
I think roms for like nes and stuff are ok but im not sure if they are legal, i mean no one buys those games at this point anyway.... games for like GBA and other recent systems are illegal for sure
It would almost definitely be illegal. I can't imagine that any of the roms/games would be older than 30 years old (and copyright lasts way longer than that) so their copyrights would still be in effect. Of course I'm no lawyer so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Yes, even if nobody buys them anymore, the manufacturers still hold copyright to those games. Try searching on Roms on google. I doubt your are going to find any big sites that offer them for download.
Even though i havent used it for ages i still rememebr one that has about all NES roms ever.. awesome stuff really if i wanna play the turtles or some oldy nes /SNES game
They are illegal and people do still buy the games. Basically though if you are a resident in a country like the netherlands you can host and provide ROMS as it's not against their laws (from what I understand) that's why there are a few around that have been so for years.
Roms are not illegal if used for Backup or demo purposes like they were meant to be. The problem is the honor system doesn't work.
I don't know, I don't think that's the case anymore. I remember a year or two ago, when Nintendo created a page on their website that discussed the issue, and I believe that it said even back-ups violate their copyright.
How would the backup claim work for a cartridge? Are there blank cartridges out there that you can write a backup file to? I can understand the backup claim on a CD-based system like Playstation, where it's possible to play a backup file on the original video game system, but with NES roms you'd be playing them on a computer, which I would think would invalidate any backup claim since the rom cannot be played on the original system the game was made for.
Another reason some sites have been around for years is that they have to be persued by the copyright holder in order to get in trouble. The copyright holder can do this at their discretion. Some game makers may have felt that the added advertising they got was worth more than the amount of money they would make from trying to sell the games. Of course they can always change their name later. For example, there were guitar tabs that were up for years. The copyright holders did not go after them partly because they had no business plan to provide that type of data through the internet. Eventually they came up with an idea and at that point they chose to shut the illegal tab sites down. Another example, people speed all the time without getting caught. That doesn't mean it is legal to drive over the speed limit.