![]() ![]() (Those aren't required legal elements, but they're the best kind of evidence.) Still, it's a stretch. Hypotheticals alone won't suffice to show substantial non-infringing uses, and ideally you'd want to show what makes MAME or something like MAME uniquely useful for non-infringing activities. More than that, there are many unique aspects to MAME and the MAME community that are especially problematic. But certainly there are many parallels between MAME and Grokster in terms of both their raison d'etre and how they're used in practice. I'd be surprised if the MAME developers were ever found liable for anything. Grokster carved out an inducement exception. The famous Sony Betamax case made "substantial non-infringing uses" a defense, but it was weakened when MGM v. Yet SCOTUS found Grokster liable for contributory infringement. That logic also applies to file sharing networks, which likewise are superficially neutral wrt usage, supporting both legal and illegal activities. It's already in Linux distros, so they're probably not gaining anything, but surely someone, somewhere will benefit. It's no worse than it was, and it might be better. I don't really see anything but potential upside here. The GPL doesn't even need to get involved. shipping ones that are still under restrictive licenses, which is nearly all of them, would be directly verboten. This, of course, is in reference to freely available ROMs. ![]() (the relevant GPLv2 clause: "In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License." Is MAME plus some ROMs a mere aggregation? Dunno.) MAME plus ROMs may not be a derivative work of MAME. The ROMs don't need MAME to run, and MAME doesn't need any specific ROM to run, so perhaps it's not infringing the GPL to distribute them together. If you ship MAME plus freely available ROMs, for which there frequently *is* no source code anymore, are you infringing the GPL? I could see arguing it either way. ![]() I guess they've decided that such bundles aren't anathema after all.Īlthough, it may end up functioning the same way. The biggest immediate impact I can think of: the original license, IIRC, was pretty much designed to stop people from bundling MAME with ROMs on CDs and selling them on EBay. I wonder if they're trying to get to a full BSD-style license, and this is an interim step? ![]()
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