[khedoros1]

ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."

Nintendo: "whether you have an authentic game or not, or whether you have possession of a Nintendo ROM for a limited amount of time, i.e. 24 hours, it is illegal to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."

Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".

And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.

[slg]

>ThatGeoGuy: "A ROM made from an official copy vs. downloaded from the internet are pretty hard to tell apart, but regardless you are allowed to own and retain such copies if you own the original."

A dollar bill stolen in a robbery is "pretty hard to tell apart" from a dollar bill you received as change from a legal cash transaction. It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.

>Those seem like conflicting statements, if you assume that "such copies" means both "a ROM made from an official copy" (i.e. read by the individual from their own cartridge) and a copy "downloaded from the internet".

I read it differently. The subject of the sentence is "an official copy" and the "vs. downloaded from the internet" portion was a prepositional phrase. On second reading it is certainly possible I misinterpreted it. The author should have used a conjunction like "and" instead of a preposition like "versus" if they wanted both copies to be the subject.

>And further, Nintendo claims that game copying devices themselves are also illegal.

Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal. They are definitively legal. However almost all games sold today have some sort of DRM included. A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.

To summarize Nintendo's point and the one that Tech Radar seconded, the only legal ROM of a commercial game is one you create yourself from a DRM free game that you already own.

[khedoros1]

> It is silly to argue that how those bills were acquired is not a factor in your claimed ownership of them.

Robbery and online downloads are worlds apart. The first is a violent act that deprives someone of their property. It's an unjust action that harms one party for the benefit of another. Downloading a ROM from the internet, for a game that the downloader already owns, lacks all of the negatives that make robbery repugnant. Legality is a different question entirely, of course; legally, it matters how I acquired the ROM.

> Nintendo says nothing about making ROMs from official copies. It does not claim they are illegal.

False. They claim that making ROMs from official copies, as well as the devices that allow you to do so, are illegal because they can be used to illegally distribute the games online. Quoting from Nintendo's FAQ:

Are Game Copying Devices Illegal?

Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer. They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks. These devices also allow for the uploading and downloading of ROMs to and from the Internet. Based upon the functions of these devices, they are illegal.

> A copying device is illegal if it tries to circumvent this DRM. Therefore if a game has DRM, there is no legal way for a person to own a ROM of that game.

That's not Nintendo's claim, but it's a claim with stronger legal support than Nintendo's. It's also moving the goalposts, IMO. Take an NES game as an example. There was a game lockout system (and similar systems in the SNES and N64 consoles), but those don't prevent access to game data, just cause the console to reboot if authentication fails. Those are 3 of the major systems that I'm thinking of when I think about getting copies of ROMs.

[BHSPitMonkey]

> Yes. Game copiers enable users to illegally copy video game software onto floppy disks, writeable compact disks or the hard drive of a personal computer.

Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?

> They enable the user to make, play and distribute illegal copies of video game software which violates Nintendo's copyrights and trademarks.

If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.

[khedoros1]

> Source that says copying bits from my own retail game disc to my own hard disk is a crime, please?

That's Nintendo's claim, not mine ;-) You'll have to ask them.

> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon? Redistribution may well be an issue in most jurisdictions, but we weren't talking about that.

In the specific case of DVDs, and in the specific case of my jurisdiction (I live in the US), I think that the argument would be that you circumvented the DRM of the Content Scrambling System, in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other jurisdictions, you'd have no problem. In the UK, for example, my understanding is that there's no restriction against breaking DRM, and that creating a copy of a copyrighted work for personal use is perfectly legal.

[DanBC]

> If I make a copy of a DVD and place it on my shelf beside the original, which laws/copyrights/trademarks have I infringed upon?

Which country are we talking about? There's something about "circumvention of technical prevention measures" which is part of WIPO and so in many laws. It's in the DMCA and in the European laws. Some of these contain exceptions for backups, but not all of them.

[detaro]

The parent isn't arguing that these things are true. Just providing quotes of things Nintendo says.

[jsgo]

no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy? Not sure if they could say that you couldn't play the backup directly (as in, that you'd be forced to push it to an official cartridge or disk), but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.

[khedoros1]

> no skin in this, but maybe it is legal to create a digital copy of your own but illegal to download someone else's generated copy?

I think that's probably true, but it's not what Nintendo is claiming. They claim that the copying devices themselves are illegal to own or use, since the result is a file that can be illegally uploaded and shared, and that as a result, any digital copy that a consumer might create is also illegal, even if kept for personal use.

> but I would wager the amount of people with the hardware to migrate NES/SNES/Genesis/etc. cartridges to ROMs is pretty low.

Yes, but not terribly exotic. There are EEPROMs that are drop-in replacements, in many cases. So they're also the kinds of chips that you can just connect an EEPROM reader to, to dump the data. Reading the data from the cartridge pins themselves can be a little more complex; I know that the 8-bit Nintendo systems broke their games into swappable sections, with access controlled by a mapper chip. To dump those games from the cartridge connector, one would need to send bank-swapping signals to the chip. The NES had a couple hundred variants of these mapper chips; the Game Boy had about 5 common ones. Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think.

I know that people build Arduino-based ROM dumpers. The secret sauce is more in the mapper-handling code than anything else.

Newer systems like the Nintendo DS are likely to be less straightforward, but I haven't looked into it that closely.

[logfromblammo]

I recall using a Nintendo DS to dump ROMs to a device in the GBA slot, which would then store it in memory, so you could then eject the cartridge in the DS slot and insert another device that could write to a MicroSD card. GBA and GB cartridges could be transferred directly from the GBA slot.

The difficulty there was in loading and running the software.

Once games distributed on discs, backing up for swap-free play became easier, but I still recall having to use the original Wii hardware to read discs and write their files to a specially formatted hard drive.

If you have the device designed to read the original game distribution medium, you can modify it, sometimes just with software, to read game files and write them to the medium of your choosing. The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.

It is also worth noting that you cannot trust a company like Nintendo or Sony to make a distinction between civil-illegal that results in a tort, where the company can sue you for damages (if they find out about it), and criminal-illegal that results in a crime, where the state can put you in prison (if they find out about it).

[khedoros1]

> The original console has to decode the data and get it to the CPU somehow, and if you can run your own code on the CPU, you can always dump, even if it is just by displaying a series of 2-d bar codes on a TV screen and taking photos of them.

That would be a novel hack, and I've considered something similar with an old IBM computer with an almost-dead floppy (probably a stretched drive belt?) The floppy will read something like the first 50-100KB from a disk, and fails on the rest. That'd easily be enough for a little program that reads the hard drive sector by sector, displaying them on screen as a colored grid, or something. Then it'd be an exercise in video processing to extract the data.

[logfromblammo]

Not novel. I heard about it from a possibly apocryphal espionage story wherein a program was loaded to an airgapped machine, then it flashed a rapid sequence of 2-d bar codes on the screen, and the attacker exfiltrated the data as a video file.

For your problem, I'd try pumping the data out of the serial or parallel ports first. An RS232 to USB cable might work.

[deaddodo]

>Not sure about the SNES. Sega Genesis/Megadrive just exposed the cartridge pins directly to the CPU's address bus, I think.

The Genesis/MD and SNES work the same way. Expose an address bus and data bus via the pins and let the cartridge handle any sort of mapping.

[khedoros1]

Sorry, my comment was badly-worded. I was thinking about older systems having 16-bit memory spaces, into which all IO is mapped (including the cartridge). So all but the absolute simplest games would need bank-switching hardware.

Looking at the Genesis and SNES, each exposes a 24-bit address bus. I was speculating that the increased area would be enough that bank switching wouldn't be necessary (the largest SNES game seems to be around 48Mbit, right? A little over a third of the CPU's memory, although I haven't looked up where the cartridge data's window is usually mapped).

Of course, there's the added fun of external coprocessors and such.

[mikekchar]

Disclaimer: I've only read your quotes and I am not a lawyer. Copyright is not a law about having a copy. It's a law about making a copy. A copy is neither legal nor illegal. Copying may infringe copyright or it may not.

Generally speaking, unless you have permission from the copyright holder (or the copyright has expired), you may not make a copy of something. Again, generally speaking, if you do not make a copy of something, then you can not infringe copyright (although, you might be liable for conspiracy or other similar things so your action may still be illegal).

The provision for private copying complicates things a little bit, but not that much. Usually private copying allows you to make a limited number of copies of things that you own, as long as it is for private use. It does not allow you to make a copy of something that you don't own. So you can't borrow it from the friend or a library and make a copy without infringing copyright.

(Quick side note since there is some discussion about Canadian copyright law: Historically there has been a levy for recorded musical performances which allows Canadians to make copies for private use. In the past you did not have to own the copy in order to make your own copy! This is a completely different issue than what I'm talking about. It only applies to recordings of musical performances, so it doesn't apply to games. I moved away from Canada a long time ago, so I've lost track of what's going on with the levy. Most misunderstood copyright law ever, I think...)

It doesn't matter if you own a copy of X. You can not make a copy of your friend's copy of X. They can not make a copy of X and give it to you. Both of those actions are infringement on copyright. Downloading off the internet doesn't change anything at all. The only grey area is which action is considered "copying" from the perspective of copyright infringement: uploading, downloading or both. My understanding is that in most countries both actions are considered "copying".

The end result is that whether or not you own a copy of a ROM, it is still infringement to download a copy from somewhere else. It may not be infringement on your part to buy or be given a physical copy. If that copy was made in an infringing way, the person who made the copy would be liable, not you. However, like I said, consipiracy, etc can still apply to you if you are knowingly entering into these kinds of arrangements.

What people usually get confused about is that if someone comes to your house and says, "You have infringed copyright" and points to your copy of the ROM, the copy itself isn't really evidence that you infringed the copyright. They would have to show that you made a copy of a different ROM (which may or may not be difficult).

Long story short --

ThatGeoGuy: technically correct since they didn't say "it's legal to download the copy from the internet". But basically misleading as hell because how did you get the copy without infringing copyright?

Nintendo: In most countries they are correct and not misleading at all. You may not download a copy from the internet unless they give permission. Also you may not play ROMs that are under copyright unless you have a license because some people have successfully argued that loading a game (or any data) into a computer is "making a copy". This latter argument may not stand up in some countries, but I wouldn't really want to be the landmark case that tests the law where you live...

Hope that makes things more clear.