Kahle v. Ashcroftany video game supported by MAME
originally submitted by Nick Sayer:
MAME is a project that aims to make old video arcade games playable on modern computers. It does this by faithfully emulating the hardware of the old systems. However, the user must find ROM images for these old games on the Internet. Almost all of the games ever made are no longer commercially available in any way, and yet placing ROM images on the Internet remains a violation of copyright law.
This also impacts those who wish to repair their games. If they lose their ROMs, they *could* burn new ones if they had access to the images.
Stifled uses
Nick Sayer:
My case touches both examples. I use MAME with many ROM images that I obtained on the Internet. I have no way to obtain permission to use these images from the copyright owners, even though I am willing to pay a reasonable amount for the privilege.
I also own a Tempest video game (copyright 1980 by Atari). The boardset I got with my cabinet is not the original one, so I found that when switching between players of a 2 player game, the screen would shrink in an odd way. Searching the Internet, I discovered that this was because of circuitry added to the later versions of the game to protect the monitor, but that fixes to the software were needed to avoid triggering the behavior I was seeing. I was forced to find copies of the newer version of the ROMs to upgrade my tempest to fix the problem.