Kahle v. AshcroftPirate's Gold
originally submitted by Joel Cretan:
Video game where you play the role of a privateer in several historical eras. It was for the Sega Genesis, a video game system popular in the early 90s. The game was rare to begin with.
Stifled uses
Joel Cretan:
I wanted to get a copy for a friend as a present. Of course, it has been out of production for years, as the video game industry has since gone through several more generations of systems. It is next to impossible to find a copy, as few were made. Perhaps if the game were not still under copyright, someone might have posted a ROM (a copy of the code that a PC can play) on a website somewhere. Illegal ROMs of many games are available on shady pirate (no pun intended) servers and P2P networks, but this game is so rare that it isn't even on any of those. No one posts ROMs on the web because it is illegal, but there's no reason it should be for old stuff like this. No one makes money from them anymore except secondhand stores. In the end, I did find one copy of the game at such a store, but I had to call every few weeks to see if they had one yet. Finally, I drove an hour to buy it, and it didn't even play at first. I, and many other people, would just die of happiness if there were some good websites that posted stable, searchable collections of video game ROMs. Why shouldn't they be allowed to?