I'm in favor of backing up physical media with digital copies. It's legal to do so in most cases for personal use. Now, I've been tinkering with console mods and junk, and I'm soon going to be in a position to make legal backups of game ROMs for use with emulators and flash carts. Here's where it gets messy. I lend/give/sell games to friends when I'm done with them a lot. When I was restricted to physical media the legality was simple. Now, I'll still have legally obtained backups because there's no reason to get rid of them. I'm really not sure where I stand ethically on the issue. And I'm not even sure how the law would handle it if they differed from my personal morality. From the perspective of a consumer, the used game industry ensures that the cost of content will appropriately depreciate over time. This drives new games to be made, enables people who couldn't afford the expense of new games to still play them, and allows people to buy games with less financial risk should they suck without potentially allowing return policies to drive up the cost of retail. From the perspective of somebody looking to sell a game, this is copying of content. Distributing copies, or profiting from the sale of a copy is wrong. This is kind of like selling/freely distributing a copy, while not. PS: I realize this topic is an ethical clusterfuck, if you want to lock the tread feel free. Not looking for a flame war, I just feel this is the most courteous place I know of that's likely to be populated by people with opinions on both sides.
well if you were giving them away for free it would be much less of an issue (if you're talking about very old titles) in some cases the companies that withheld IPs aren't even around anymore to reclaim their dues. but why redistribute at all? aren't you content owning your own stuff and not meddling with selling it?
I, and almost all of my friends, are broke. Financial failsafes and sharing are pretty common. I've had to sell off my things to make ends meet before, and sharing makes life a lot more pleasant for everybody involved. I'm dealing with a current gen console(3DS specifically). I probably won't sell my games, but lending them is a definite possibility for singleplayer games. I won't make backups of multiplayer games because I view multiplayer with company hosted servers as a service.
So, I think legally the issue is simple (note I'm not commenting on the personal ethics here).... The rule allowing you to make legal backups of something you own is prerequisite on the fact that you own said item. Once you transfer that ownership through a sale, really you should destroy any backups of the official unmodified item as you no longer hold licence to it. Any derivative work based on the ip should be safe and you should keep that separately as that represents your own ip. Where lending is concerned, your backups are fine as you haven't relinquished your licence to the ip. The restriction in this circumstance should be that only 1 copy of the software should be in use at a time, so you'd only be in the wrong if were to play from a backup copy whilst your friend was playing the original. This is based on the assumption of the contractual terms of the game granting a single user license to use the software...
