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| Acmlm's Board - I3 Archive - ROM Hacking - Legal Ramifications of ROM Hacking |
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Guy Perfect                    Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6287 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| Due to what DahrkDiaz has recently experienced, I figured it'd be a good time to make sure everyone is in the know in terms of what we as ROM hackers are allowed to do and what Nintendo in terms of prosecution is allowed to do.
In the United States, the only significant law to be concerned about is the Copyright Law, which enables the holder of a copyright to take legal action against anyone who meets the criteria for Infringement. Title 17, Chapter 13, Section 1309 of the U.S. Copyright Law deals with the definition and application of copyright infringement. Subsection (e) defines "infringing article" as the following:
Now, infringing articles in themselves are not illegal. The distribution of such articles is, however. Subsection (a) presents two scenarios under which a copyright may be infringed. Subsection (b), referenced in the quote below, is a list of exceptions that basically apply to authorized distributers (such as sellers).
To hack ROMs is not an infringement of copyright as defined above. To distribute ROMs as well is not an infringement of copyright, but it violates a different law: Intellectual Property. Know this: it is illegal to distribute ROMs on the internet in any way. Nintendo, while I personally think they're great in many ways, is dishonorable when it comes to regarding emulation. Nintendo would like the world to believe that emulation is illegal and ROMs are illegal. This is not the case. Nintendo will take no actions or threaten to take any actions against someone who does not do one of two things: 1) Distribute a ROM or 2) Sell a modification of a game. Distribution violates Intellectual Property, and selling of modifications violates Copyright. In terms of editors or IPS patches, on the other hand, neither activity is illegal. Nintendo has no right to ownership of something they didn't have any hand in creating. The bottom line is this: ROM Hacking is not illegal and Nintendo will not attempt to prosecute you for it. Distributing modified games or parts of games, on the other hand, will land you in the middle of a lawsuit. When distributing editors or IPS patches, make sure you have a notice that your work in no way encourages piracy and is intended only for those who have themselves legitimately created archival copies of their own games. Interestingly enough, Nintendo's Corporate Info - Legal page is largly a plagiarism of an article from the ESA that deals with their anti-piracy actions. The article was reworded a bit in favor of Nintendo's philosophy, but I have found no acknowledgement on Nintendo's site stating that they are using borrowed material. If anyone finds said acknowledgement, let me know. Otherwise, Nintendo is breaking a law in order to tell others not to break laws. Hypocricy at its best. |
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Omega45889 Shyguy Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6318 days Last view: 6333 days |
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| Im quite sure that it was an April Fools joke, but its still good to know exactly where i stand. | |||
Arthus  140 Since: 11-17-05 From: Australia Last post: 6497 days Last view: 6497 days |
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| Maybe this could be stickied to make people relize what we are doing is illegal. | |||
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The Onyx Dragoon 150  Since: 11-17-05 From: Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, Sitting on an Asteroid Last post: 6289 days Last view: 6286 days |
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well...sure, most people here need to be careful since almost all ROMs are copyrighted. However...sometimes I enjoy playing Mario Adventure more than playing the original SMB3  . |
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Sonicandfails 910  Since: 11-17-05 From: Mass Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| Come on...
People... Please tell me you are kidding BGNG... Look at the recieved time of Dark's email... "Sent : Friday, March 31, 04:01:06" For the love of god just read the time of it.... |
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Guy Perfect Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6287 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| Sonicandtails
I am well aware the "legal action" is a hoax. Should I go change the first sentence of my first post to make you happy? Arthus Re-read my post. ROM hacking is not illegal. Nonetheless, it's still important to make sure people in the ROM Hacking community don't try to take liberties they're not allowed to take. (edited by BGNG on 04-01-06 12:23 PM) |
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insectduel Lantern Ghost Not welcome here anymore.  Since: 11-18-05 From: Bronx, New York Last post: 6528 days Last view: 6323 days |
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| I belive that BGNG do not joke. I been concerned about these things myself. Very interesting topic. | |||
Disch Red Cheep-cheep Since: 12-10-05 Last post: 6565 days Last view: 6565 days |
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Originally posted by BGNG It completely depends on the circumstances. However I'm sure 99.9999999999% of people hacking ROMs are doing so though illegal means. Illegally obtaining a ROM in the first place throws a whole dark cloud over your actions and pretty much destroys any validity to an "I'm not breaking the law" claim. And while your original modifications might be legally distributable as IPS patches -- many IPS patches are just as illegal as the ROMs themselves due to their containment of copyrighted material. How many people take graphics from one game and put them in another? When you do that, the original game's graphics are now in the IPS patch. So yes... theoretically it's possible to obtain and hack ROMs 100% legally. Though in reality nobody does it. Everyone here is breaking the law. But really... who cares? Freeware emulation and piracy go hand in hand. I say quit trying to find legal loopholes and just accept it. |
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Guy Perfect Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6287 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| I myself make a point to refrain from obtaining ROMs from the internet. What I use in my hacking is what I legally own. I'm sure there is a good number of people who do the same, even though the majority of ROM Hackers are likely to be pirates.
Every generation of Nintendo system up to GameCube, for example, has had publically-available backup utilities. It only takes a little money to create a legitimate ROM. |
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interdpth Mole MZM rapist Since: 11-18-05 Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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I remember hearing that dumping your own ROMs is illegal by Nintendo and dumpers should be destroyed. Yet other states you can make a backup. So that's why I have a dump of MZM and Pokemon Ruby on my computer. Go dumpers and being my only reason to hack.  |
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HyperHacker Star Mario Finally being paid to code in VB! If only I still enjoyed that. <_< Wii #7182 6487 4198 1828 Since: 11-18-05 From: Canada, w00t! My computer's specs, if anyone gives a damn. STOP TRUNCATING THIS >8^( Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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It's actually not hard to dump ROMs on a lot of more recent Nintendo systems, since there's more ways to get your own code running on them. With NES, SNES and Game Boy, the only way you could usually run your own code was to build your own cartridge, which leaves no way to insert a cartridge to copy.1 N64 has Gameshark that connects to the PC, Gamecube has the PSO exploit (or you can replace the bootROM), GBA has multiboot, and DS has the various boot-from-GBA-cart hacks (or replace the firmware); all of these let you run your own code while an official cart is still inserted. Ironically, the systems that Nintendo put the most effort into protecting are the ones that are easiest to dump ROMs from.  (Actual piracy, however, can be quite a pain. I don't pirate (no, seriously) but just look how long it took for GC and DS.)
1Well, you could use a rewritable cart, run your program entirely from RAM, swap carts, copy a bit, swap back, and write. Have fun doing it, though, as the size of a ROM tends to greatly exceed the amount of RAM available. Also, NES, SNES and probably others will reset if the cart is removed due to the protection chips. |
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FreeDOS + Giant Red Koopa Legion: freedos = fritos  Since: 11-17-05 From: Seattle Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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| Well traditionally you soldier together your own cartridge reader to plug into your computer's serial port to dump the ROM contents, or even dedicated dumpers for each ROM chip (in the case of multiple chips which was common on NES, Genesis, SNES, N64; also perhaps for dumping BIOSes to use in true emulators).
Starting in the Game Boy Color and Nintendo 64 days, it has become common for commercial products to become available in the grey market for dumping ROMs. The quality and accuracy is usually questionable and for smart buying you depend on daring people who might or might not be legimate to report on them. There's also similar things for disc-based systems. For example, PlayStation discs are CD-ROMs, PS2 ones are DVD, PS3 will be Blu-ray. Basically that means the whole PlayStation line so far can have the game data read just by having a standard computer drive. I think both Xboxes are DVD-based, but I'm not sure. For GameCube, most DVD drives won't read them due to non-standard components before the first track, but there are also exploits in PSO to dump discs. (Note that BIOS dumping usually involes the other methods of soldiering pins and putting them in a serial port, etc; usually useful for true emulation and not for high-level-emulation (aka HLE; exploits the fact that modern console games are done in C or C++ so it emulates a runtime library instead of the system)). |
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HyperHacker Star Mario Finally being paid to code in VB! If only I still enjoyed that. <_< Wii #7182 6487 4198 1828 Since: 11-18-05 From: Canada, w00t! My computer's specs, if anyone gives a damn. STOP TRUNCATING THIS >8^( Last post: 6285 days Last view: 6285 days |
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Actually, most BIOS dumps I've seen are done using some hole on the system itself. GBA's BIOS could only be read by code within itself, but one of the functions that reads from a table didn't check the index, so it could be made to read from any address. DS used a similar protection for the ARM7 BIOS (the ARM9's is, strangely enough, not protected  ), and this can be defeated by jumping to a few bytes in the BIOS which just happen to be the instructions to read from a given address and return. |
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1152 Newcomer  Since: 03-23-06 From: Portland Last post: 6605 days Last view: 6605 days |
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Originally posted by BGNG No offense but I believe you are mistaken. Intellectual property is a blanket term used to describe copyright law, patent law, and a few other things. Intellectual property is not a law in itself. Distributing ROMs is copyright infringement. Originally posted by BGNG The ESA could have given Nintendo permission to use that material, in which case there is no problem. |
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