Piracy is a construct of the human mind ego which is based in scarcity. Done. Now everyone piss off with the illegal,criminal theft, illusion bla bla bla.
If they can prove that you downloaded copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, they can convict you for copyright infringement. Simple as that.True. but again... they can't PROVE it if you don't distribute.
They can't even prove it wasn't planted. Innocent until proven guilty for criminal cases. And there are court rulings on speculative damages.
Proving download doesn't prove any copyright violation on the part of the downloader.
The whole structure is seriously flawed. I use to “acquire” every game that interested me. Later I decided that I will only play games that I obtain a physical copy of. These are usually USED games I buy secondhand so the Publishers/Developers/Console maker don’t see a ‘red dime’ (Knives Out).
If they can prove that you downloaded copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder, they can convict you for copyright infringement. Simple as that.
I think you're getting the wrong idea here. All a copyright holder needs to prove is that you download their work without their permission.Unless you confess, they most likely can't prove it.
which is my point.
If law enforcement gets a search warrant to bust into your house and go through your hard drives, guess what? You're fucked. If they got that far, it means that they already have some evidence on you, which probably includes server logs and/or data kindly provided by your ISP.And that proof is darn near impossible to get without very invasive spyware and human rights violations.
As long as you stick to direct downloads, they have their work cut out for them to prove their case. First they must prove that the copyrighted work was on the server you downloaded it from. Otherwise they have no way to even GET probable cause to search your computer, unless you do something silly like confessing. To do that they have to download it themselves from the server. which is fair, they own the copyright, they have permission, it's not a violation for them to do that. Then they have to get the access logs to the remote server, which will have a list of all IPs that have download the file, provided said haven't been scrubbed, and even exist in the first place. And if they do get logs, there are probably dynamic IPs in them. If so, they also have to get info from the isp to prove that it was assigned to that customer at the time. Which again is not a guarantee.
So assuming they somehow get accurate logs, and track it being downloaded to your home's IP at the time, they still haven't proven that you personally did it. It could have been someone else in your house sharing the same internet IP. It could have been someone who hacked into your wi-fi. That happens all the time. It coud be a house guest on a laptop who is long gone, and they can't trace it because the computer isn't even there.
Even the presence of the files on your computer is not proof you downloaded it. maybe you just downloaded a no-cd so you wouldn't have to put in the CD. Maybe it's a gog.com game you bought. there's no way to tell the difference by looking at your computer. Your computers copy could be legit. the pirated copy might be on a different computer, which as i said above, might not even be there.
Some malware may have downloaded it. That's not your fault, is it?
It's just not that simple to prove.
If you do torrent without a VPN, then all they have to do is join the swarm, and they find out all the IPs of everyone involved at the time. which makes it MUCH easier for them to match things up and get that proof and claim major statuatory damages.
The length (term, as in term limits for politicians, if you prefer the proper legal phrase) is less of an issue. Most consoles are arrangements of common chips and that is hard to do anything with (one reason why emulation can exist so happily) -- not like Nintendo made the 6502 for the NES or ARM chips for most of its handhelds and consoles since the GBA. You having 4KB of video memory at a given address is also nothing special, novel, unique or inventive.As of 2021 What game systems have expired all their patents and so can be legally cloned?
The NES (and presumably anything earlier) has expired patents. maybe the master system can be cloned too. But only systems that don't have a BIOS, can be cloned so easily.
afaik, in canada, acquiring pirated information for personal use still isn't illegal, only distribution/profit is.
Also the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Sega CD and Sega 32x.
The Sega CD bios may still be copyrighted but not all emulators need it.
When you say illegal, do you mean criminal?
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/eng/h_wr02281.html
May? Why do you think it isn't?
Software follows different laws to hardware..
Otherwise any Game from 30 years ago would have become freeware and that's not the case.