Is it legal to download games free

In them olden days, I wrote code for Comten for years. When IBM copied it, they even copied my mis-spellings in the comments to the source code. The lawyer's had fun. It is all part of the Big Game for tiny minds. I guarantee if you got hauled in before the Canadian SC over this and you owned the cart they would throw it out. Rom paranoia is stupid anyway. It's all for consoles nintendo no longer sells, and it'll be decades before they well and truly start monetizing dead properties.

Plus, nothing is wrong if you don't get caught. Considering that ROM's have been around for decades, it makes you wonder why only now the Nintendo cares. But the answer comes from what Nintendo did in the last couple years. They tried the idea of making a "Classic" console with the games to see if they would sell. There is profit to be made. I'd disagree. As copyright companies are so fond of saying, you didn't buy the game, you bought a license authorizing you to play the game.

Since you paid for and own the right to play the game, where you get the bits which allow you to play the game should be irrelevant in the eyes of the law. In fact, the copyright holder would be in violation of their purchase contract with you if you paid for the license but lost the original media, and they refused to provide you with replacement media to let you use the license you paid for.

Their answer cannot be "buy another license, but oops, sorry, we're not selling them anymore. Downloading is not distribution, so you cannot violate copyright by downloading something.

Bootleg CDs are a great example. This fair use argument is potentially very wide reaching, but there are limits. Consider the entertainment industry. For ROMs it largely works the same way, which is why sites that share games are so frequently shut down. Instead of leaving films constantly on the market, they periodically re-release them, which builds up demand and increases sales when that release actually comes.

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Best Gaming Keyboards. Best Drones. Best 4K TVs. Best iPhone 13 Cases. Best Tech Gifts for Kids Aged Awesome PC Accessories. Best Linux Laptops. The problem is that when people freely copy and distribute games made by defunct companies, there is nobody around to enforce the copyright. I suppose you could look at it the way a child would when it comes to stealing a cookie out of the jar when nobody is looking.

For a copyright on something to be released so that others may use it, the owner of said copyright must formally release their rights. If a company is going out of business, why would they even do that? In some ways, the downloading of abandonware is as much as moral issue as it is a legal one.