As far as the video gaming industry is concerned, "roms/backups" and "piracy" are 2 very different things. Also it should be noted that the "ethical" side of the matter is actually quite different from the "legal" side.
Back in the good old days, people used to record whatever they could view on their TV using their VCR's , and it wouldn't be called piracy until someone would start to sell a recording of copy-righted material and actually make illegal profit out of it, which was "ethically" different from sharing your favourite tv shows with your friends and family without actually charging them, or setting the VCR to record your favourite TV show while you were away at work or something... And a REAL pirate had to be someone that retained an actual physical existence out in the real world, selling actual physical copies of copy-righted material, thus it was far more practical and economic to leave it up to the actual physical law enforcement agencies to get out there and go after people who could for sure be proven guilty with the crime of piracy...
However, after DVD's, the internet and the advent of digital formats came along, things started to change dramatically, since people could easily have access to "100% free media" from within the safety of their own home... as opposed to going out there into the slums or wherever you could buy "cheaper,not free" copies at the risk of entangling with dubious "pirates/criminals". Thus the laws and the entertainment industries began to steadily draw very clear lines and limitations around the market and the various media products... Back in the old days almost nearly any God given, run of the mill vcr could record anything from TV right out of the box, and blank vhs tapes, cassette tapes, and blank discs was a lucrative industry in its own right... Nowadays a single flash drive can store bulks of mixed media of any type of format, and recording TV shows is somewhat tricky and requires purchasing additional equipment...
Video games happens to be a very specific case scenario, partly because video games, unlike movies and music, were never aired directly to people's TV sets, and their native format started out as 1st party proprietary cartridges, which were never available in "blanks"... and no video gaming console has ever given paying customers the ability to record and share their games, or back them up (at least until the end of the 1990's), thus the concept of "sharing" your game was always rendered 100% illegal.
Another one of the many things that sets video games apart is "regional lockout"... Quite a lot of decent titles (such as all those cool Japanese RPG's that were never released outside Japan) were far more easily accessible via pirate/warez channels, and this is mostly because, simply, most people outside Japan don't speak Japanese... And even if one was to purchase a legal copy of a foreign game and have it imported all the way from Japan at additional costs, they would eventually still have to back it up in order to be able to implement English subtitles, or perform the so called "un-dubbing" process (And mind you all that during the cartridge days this was not possible... It's only when games started to come out on compact discs that people started to be able to do it the legal way, since there weren't any practical means of extracting the game from the cartridge onto the computer - and this is still true for 3DS as well as SWITCH games! - But, with that being said, one could still pay for the Japan-only game and put it on the shelf, thus abiding to the good morals and ethics of a good consumer, and then go on ahead and download the same game via a pirate/warez channel, which is is still "technically" breaking the law! This is one of the case scenarios that justify the clear cut difference between what is "ethical" and what is "legal")
Sorry for the tedious long post, it's just that this is one of the rather important subject matters that is hardly ever discussed with proper justice... and this thread just seemed to hit the spot for me...
