Quote Originally Posted by SegNin View Post
The government only goes after piracy groups; they don't bother with individuals, preferring to let the civil courts handle individual pirates through lawsuits.

But the ESA isn't going to sue you for downloading old games because they'd have a tough time proving the profitability of games which they're no longer manufacturing or selling.

Which is another reason they don't bother suing, since it would actually cost them money (legal fees) rather then save them money.

What the ESA does, is if they catch you hosting or sharing roms or ISO's from their "protected" list, they send you cease and desist (C & D) letter ordering you to remove those "protected" games.

Which is why the big rom sites often don't have Mario or Zelda games because the ESA sent them a C & D demanding that they remove those games.
Ironically though, you'll find Mario and Zelda games on crappy little GeoCities sites, because the ESA can't search for every site on the "Net that has rom downloads.

And then there's the curious fact that there are well-known GBA rom sites that have lasted for years without any interference from the ESA or Nintendo, even though they have Mario and Zelda GBA games. Same with NDS rom sites.

To be honest, I can't figure out the ESA's strategy, but then, who can ever understand how lawyers think anyway?

In any case, you shouldn't worry about it.
So, keep your collection, and just ignore your brother, who's just being an ass.

Very well said, that's more or less the deal. The thing is, it's pretty much illegal for us to host roms and for you to download them. However, legal and ethical are completely different things.
As far as the ESA's strategy is concerned they play sly, they never really email the webmaster of the site. They always email the hosting company hoping that the company will get scared and shut down the site. But in any case, we take C&D's as they come our way, not much we can do about that, they DO have a legal leg to stand on and may use it for some donkey-style kicking if we let them

I don't think there's anything YOU should worry about though, because a very big part of catching individual downloaders is cooperation from the website. We don't even log what our users are doing, let alone turn over our logs to authorities. We don't have any logs, for yours and our security