Comment on Steam Deck Now Cheaper Than A Switch During Valve's Big Summer Sale

• thingsiplay@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  You can if you own the Mario game…

  Owning alone is not enough. You need to dump it yourself. Downloading others Roms, even if you own the game, is illegal. Because you are only allowed to play what you dumped yourself, not the backup copy of a different individual cartridge.

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  • blindsight@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Depends on your jurisdiction.

    As far as I know, that’s never been tried in court in Canada, and there’s reason to suspect that may not be the case here. (Although I’m not a lawyer, so I may be mistaken.)

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    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Downloading Roms from others is basically taking their copy. Its not a copy of your individual cart. And that’s the thing. You have the right to make a copy of your cart and use it. But you are not allowed to distribute the copy. One could probably get away by using Roms from others, but that is open to interpretation of law for individual countries. However the distribution itself is not allowed, in any (normal) country. And I also don’t believe (believe is not knowledge, I have no knowledge of Canadas laws) distributing personal backup copies is allowed in Canada as well.

      Using copies from libraries is something different BTW, as these are not personal backups and are meant to be used by many other people. But that can be complicated too, in example in case of Archive.org. It’s a library in the US, but not other countries in the world.

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      • blindsight@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Downloading content is almost definitely legal in Canada, and non-commercial digital distribution has never gone to court, so its legality hasn’t been established.

        I can’t find the source, but I recall reading speculation that sharing backup copies between owners of the media is likely legal in Canada but, again, it hasn’t been tried by courts, so its legality hasn’t been firmly established.

        Anyway, with non-commercial digital distribution not having any legal teeth in Canada, it’s effectively legal and its literal legality is unknown.

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      • lud@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Maybe, but who cares?

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