Is This Legal?

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JOKER_JOKER

Limp Gawd
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I was debating putting this in the general gaming section, but I thought you guys might know more about this. Many of my fellow classmates are really into playing emulated NES and Genesis games at school. First off, are the games still copyrighted (is that the correct term)? If so, I'm guessing that their activities are illegal. But it would be much simpler for the less computer-savy people to just play the games on the site, instead of having to download everything. Would it be possible to somehow put the emulator and games on the site so that people can play them in the browser, like addictinggames.com? If so, could you give a quick explanation on how I would accomplish that? Also, would that be legal?
 
I think if it were built into the site, the company would have to sue, because allowing a copy right infringement sets a president and could hurt them. But I doubt Nintendo *really* cares that much. It's not like you can buy the game anymore, so how are you hurting them?
 
Obi_Kwiet said:
I think if it were built into the site, the company would have to sue, because allowing a copy right infringement sets a president and could hurt them. But I doubt Nintendo *really* cares that much. It's not like you can buy the game anymore, so how are you hurting them?
Click to expand...

True, but now they're bringing the Virtual Console with the Wii, so they might care slightly more (speculation).

Here's a link to a company which apparently does roughly the same thing, and AFAICT it has received a cease and desist from NOA but that was it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Classix

As for your friends - downloading game ROMs is generally illegal.
 
vNES

Runs a lot of NES games within a Java Applet. Of course, I'm not sure about the legality over the issue, though.
 
JOKER_JOKER said:
First off, are the games still copyrighted
Click to expand...
Any current intellectual property that anyone anywhere produces is covered by copyright. Even things in the public domain. The thing is that the rights reserved by the copyright owner vary. Most IP owners withhold all rights, then sell specific rights in exchange for payment or royalties. Others release almost all the rights, as long as specific conditions are met. A few will relaese all rights unconditionally, but that almost never happens.

"Current" means that copyright protection hasn't expired. There's lots of rules for deciding how it expires, but I don't think any of them will apply to any computer games for a while.

I don't believe that allowing copyright infringement "sets precident". (Trademark infringement is a different matter.) The reason for this should be obvious: it should not be up to a copyright holder to go and find all instances of infringements of their rights. They can't police everything everywhere, looking for pirates.
 
i don't recall what it was called, but a while back i saw a website which contained only ROMS of which the webmaster had a real copy (ie cartidge). the idea was to allow anybody online to play an NES, SNES, Genesis game through java, but only one instance of each game could be run at once, thereby eliminating copyright infringement.

in fact, the website asks for donations of game cartidges in order to legally provide a game that they currently do not provide.
 
Ok, since it's even questionable I'm not going to do it. I don't want to start a whole new thread for HTML help, so I'm just going to ask here. For some reason, the banner on my site restrikted.com just doesn't want to center. I may be a n00b at web design, but I DO know that when you say align="center", the image should center. Can anyone explain this?
 
lol, no offense, but if you're asking for DHTML help, the odds are definitely not in your favor for getting an NES emulator java applet working. To mention nothing about the bandwidth that that would probably consume if even just 10 of your friends tried playing at the same time...
 
First off, its not really HTML help, it just that the page is shifted to the left on my computer, like there is empty space on the right. And, I have "unlimited bandwidth," but I have a free account set up, so I won't be charged extra if I go over.
 
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/faqs/legal.html


U.S. copyright laws state that copyrights owned by corporations are valid for 75 years from the date of first publication. Because video games have been around for less than three decades, the copyrights of all video games will not expire for many decades to come.
 
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