> Well written, but how is this event fundamentally breaching the MAME team's
> self-defined morals, which have disregarded (or sidestepped around) the holy
> principle of private (intellectual) property for the last 25 years ?
Ah yes, those dastardly MAME devs, developing an emulator, which has been proven time and time again in actual court cases to be legal, and leaving it up to users and other people to actually track down ROM sets. Let me go grab my pitchfork.
> I mean you could have written mostly the same slippery-slope tirade the first day a
> copyright holder sent in a C&D.
Which no copyright holder has ever done. To date, the extent of any demands by copyright holders that have been leveled at the MAME team were a courteous request to not support certain games by HanaHo (which, to my knowledge, we still don't), and a request from Cave to not support certain newer titles of theirs, which we dutifully adhered to until they went belly-up.
> And IMHO 1995 Namco had a better point, at least from
> the legal POV, as the "actual creator" of the product.
I guess you'll have to be more specific as to what court case you're referring to, because a quick search for cases involving Namco in 1995 didn't turn up a whole lot, except for a patent involving hot-joining linked arcade cabinets for a multiplayer game.
> MAME, like other emulators, comes from the hacking / reverse-engineering culture,
> which has always been willing to bend the rules a bit to pursue art, experiments,
> research... it's just that most people tend to grow more right-wing as we get older
> and richer
Sure, if you totally ignore the case law, as well as specific DMCA exemptions, that have established that copying a copyrighted work is perfectly fine if it's for the purposes of reverse-engineering and interoperability. Distributing those copyrighted works, not so much, but the MAME team does not and has not ever done that.
> That collector has the right to be furious because we're all entitled to our opinions
> and feelings, I'm mostly amused because there's been no harm except from the sudden
> loss in value of his collection, but this is what happens when you speculate,
> sometimes unexpected things happen and your little gamble bites you in the ass.
> Especially when you "invest" in immaterial stuff. "High-end collectors" should still
> value the real machine, right ?
One would hope so, but at this point, one of these "collectors" selling an Akka Arrh machine between to another is about as likely as sunshine and rainbows flying out of my asshole. I'd bet dollars to donuts that for these kinds of people, it's not about any monetary value in the first place. It's about ego and bragging rights, having something that nobody else has, or at least what anyone outside of one's own insular little enclave doesn't have. From my perspective, it's kind of shitty, but that is ultimately their god-given right to be that way.
You seem to be overly focused on this whole copyright thing, so let's take that entirely out of the equation.
In one scenario, I have some floppy disks for my Commodore 64, containing some one-of-a-kind public domain software that I downloaded from a BBS back in the day. Turns out I'm the only one who has a remaining copy of that software. I wire up a 1541 drive to my PC, image them, and share them with the world, as is my right to do. Great, all is well.
Now in an alternate scenario, I have this same public domain software, but for whatever reason, I decide that I like being the only person with a copy of that public domain software, and don't feel inclined to share it - as is my right to do as well. Let's say my broadband modem stops working at some point. I phone up my ISP, and unlike any ISP in the history of ever, they send out a tech to fix it. "Have no fear," says the tech, "you go get some lunch, and I'll have this baby fixed up in no time." While I'm off having lunch, this guy fixes up my modem, but also decides to take it upon himself to image those same floppies, and shares the contents with the world. That's shitty. That is a violation of the established trust with a person who I allowed into my proverbial castle to perform a service.
If what Scott alleges is true, then that alleged repair dude is equally shitty. Not for copyright infringement, but for violating that trust.
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