Similarly, if you download a ROM of a game you already own, that could be okay too. This concept is known as the Fair Use Standard along those same lines, if you already own a game, and you back up your game into a ROM file to play on a different medium, that is legally defensible. You’ve already purchased the music, you are simply backing it up and transferring your purchase to another medium. Now if you back up a copy of media you already own - like ripping a music CD to mp3 so you can load it onto an iPod - previous court proceedings have ruled that there is no market harm. But if you download the game without purchasing it, you are creating market harm in other words, you downloaded a game as a substitution for its purchase. So for example, if Sega creates and releases a game for sale, they expect to be compensated for its purchase and use. The underlying basis of copyright is to protect the value of a product. In the United States, copyrighted works are protected for 75 years. But the real legal dispute starts when you load a ROM file into an emulator, and play the game. That being said, some emulators require you to load BIOS (boot files) that are specific to a device, such as the Sega CD or Sony Playstation, in order to work properly the legality or propriety of loading these BIOS files into an emulator is a matter of debate. In fact, in 1999 Sony tried to sue a company for creating an emulator and lost the court ruling on every single count. Emulators are certainly legal to download, they’re just software files. The programs that run ROMs are known as emulators these programs emulate a specific video game environment and load ROMs like the original system loads a cartridge or game disc. They’re basically a “dump” of a game cartridge’s contents into a single file. Game files are saved on Read-Only Memory images, better known as ROMs. So let’s look at what we know at this moment in history. The files needed to run retro games are fairly easy to find on the Internet, but is the act of downloading these files illegal? Turns out the answer is not easy to pin down, because video game copyright has not been tested in court. Last updated: 24OCT2020 (see Changelog for details)
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