It doesn't matter if a forum is directly hosting any infringing content or not -- merely linking to it is pretty much enough to get a judgement for contributory copyright infringement or even for vicarious liability for copyright infringement in the United States if a rightsholder were to pursue it.SolidSonicTH wrote:Roareye wrote:However you also need to be aware that, while you may hold that view too, legally we have no rights to share game ROMs. And while you might think a big company like Sega would care little for our relatively small community - believe me, they will care if we become a ROM sharing hotbed. They have a dedicated legal department, who have nothing but time to waste suing our forum into the floor. Will they realistically get any money from that? No. But it could (and likely would) destroy this community.
While that is true, presumably the forum isn't hosting the content either. The users are just exchanging where to find a specific game if someone casually were to ask.
Again, as I see it the intent is more to keep people interested in the platform at a time where new copies can't be had and used copies are at the whim of an ever-changing market. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to expose people to new and interesting games.
Plus my copy of Street Fighter Alpha 3 seems to have disc-rotted so I can't get it to be consistently playable anymore.
Think about it this way -- if you were someone running a website, would you really want to potentially face financial ruin to satisfy a few people who want to pirate games?
