Help!! Please

mofu

Please help me. I am building a website and i want to put emulators and roms on it but i dont know if it is illegal to download them and the put them on my site!!!! If it is then please tell me how i can do it

mofu

seamus

The emulators are perfectly legal to put up. Internet law is still in it's infancy in Ireland, so I don't know what the story is about the roms. Just follow the American's lead and you should be OK. Visit www.mame.dk to see what they have. Basically you must agree to a disclaimer before downloading. Companies that still exist (you'd be surprised how many have gone bust since the A500 days) must be contacted to see if they want money for each download, and same applies to holders of copyrights for games written by said bust companies. If in doubt, simply link to someone else's download location (as opposed to hostig the d/l yourself) until the matter is resolved. 80p might be able to shed more light on it.

mofu

So does that mean i can put emulators on my page and it will be okay. So people will be able to download emulators off my page.

seamus

Afaik, yep no problem. Emulators are the property of the programmer who wrote them, not the company whose hardware/software is being emulated. Roms, however are exact copies of the software, hence the legal questions. As well, if you do a search you will notice there are far more people offering emulators than roms for download.

Mixie

Yep, emulators aren't a problem. Just in the case of, e.g. PSemu - don't upload the bios files, as they are the property of Sony AFAIK. For more info on that, you could try reading up on the Bleem/Sony court cases where Bleem had to prove they didn't use the PS bios in their software. Zdnet had quite a bit of info at the time on it, and associated legalities.

seamus

Originally posted by Mixie
Just in the case of, e.g. PSemu - don't upload the bios files, as they are the property of Sony AFAIK.

More on that - if you are going to host emulators, try and install and use them all yourself, so you'll be in a good position to give help, your own experience. And as Mixie said, there are emulators that require BIOS-style 'kick' or startup roms, which are still property of the company. For example, Amiga kick roms are still property of Commodore (or whoever owns them), but plenty of sites give details of how to get these roms from your amiga yourself (which is perfectly legal). Maybe include these instructions for any emulator with such a system in place.
Remember, people are much more likely to come back to your site(== more hits) if they can get everything they need there

DeadBankClerk

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smoke.me.a.kipper

dont link to roms on other sites. they go to the trouble of uploading them and hosting them on their bandwidth and your just steeling them. oh and roffle dbc.