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Aielyn on 01 March 2016
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Ruler said:
Aielyn said:

You do realise that it's possible to get ROMs legally, right? It's legal in many countries to extract the ROM of a game and store it on your computer - as long as you own the game itself, and don't distribute the ROM, you're fine. It's not up to the fan translator to control whether the patch is applied to a ROM legally acquired, or illegally pirated.

Making a patch doesn't require permission, if the patch is free and doesn't contain infringing content. Word translation isn't really infringing, any more than it would be infringing for someone to read out the words of a game to a friend.

Actually the only true 100% legal thing is if you would play the original carts on an Retron console or playing the original discs on the PC. Even if you own it you are not allowed to download another illegally uploaded file, only if you burn your own Disc games on your hardrive it would be fair use.

But it doesnt matter whats legal and what isnt, we all know the majority downloads because they dont have the original games.

I said it was legal to *extract* the ROM. I didn't say it was legal to download it. That is within the "distribute" category.

And whether the majority of downloads of ROMs are for one reason or another is irrelevant to the people providing fan translation patches. The patches are, generally, legal.