Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on June 02, 2004 01:04 AM
Don't let their lawyers scare you. If I'm selling a used Honda I can very well state that fact. That isn't abuse of their trademark becuase I'm using it to refer to their own product. It would only be abuse if I was selling something else and calling it a Honda or saying that I was an authorized Honda dealer.
But the DK example is still illegal unless you are distributing a valid license with the ROM. If you are, first sale applies. The license can be transferred and the new owner gets the same rights as if they were the first person to buy it. But most of these ROM sites aren't legitimate: they are distributing way more copies than they hold licenses for (not to mention many of them probably just got the image from another site).
So the main concern is copyright law, not trademarks or the DMCA. These games are so old, and they are in hardware, that there's nothing which could be claimed as a copy control device. And as the one website pointed out, there is a exemption for media which can no longer be read by other means.
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Trademarks
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on June 02, 2004 01:04 AMBut the DK example is still illegal unless you are distributing a valid license with the ROM. If you are, first sale applies. The license can be transferred and the new owner gets the same rights as if they were the first person to buy it. But most of these ROM sites aren't legitimate: they are distributing way more copies than they hold licenses for (not to mention many of them probably just got the image from another site).
So the main concern is copyright law, not trademarks or the DMCA. These games are so old, and they are in hardware, that there's nothing which could be claimed as a copy control device. And as the one website pointed out, there is a exemption for media which can no longer be read by other means.
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