ROM Hack Legal grounds on betas(in .gba or .ips)?

[FireEmblemGuy]

About a week and a half ago, two beta builds of Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken (J) were "found" and days later accepted as scene releases, and there's a couple questions I have:

1) Should these be added, as something like a nuked dump, to the GBATemp release list? I know the GBA list isn't up to date here, it doesn't list these two or, apparently, Bratz: The Movie (E) according to Ludibria. I'd add them, but I don't know how to do that, exactly, and I'm too lazy anyways.

2) Is it legal to post these betas here? The site where the prototypes were first revealed to, at least that I know of, had to give out a warning to someone for posting links to at least one of them, but allowed IPS patches later making Fire Emblem (U) into one of the two prototype builds, which is pretty much the same as patching Super Mario Advance to be Final Fantasy IV. On top of that, the way the prototypes came to be public is fairly interesting; from what I've heard these were actually stolen of off Intelligent System's servers about 5 years ago and only recently came to see the light of day.

 

[Destructobot]

2. Absolutely not. Betas are still copyrighted works, and in that sense they are no different than dumps of released games. Even the patches are a violation, as they only contain pieces of those copyrighted works. It's not like a translation patch or a rom hack where the stuff in the patch was never in the copyrighted work to begin with. (I suppose a translation of copyrighted text is a bit of a gray area, but they are generally accepted as legal)

 

[TSPhoenix]

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works actually states that any unauthorised translation (aka all ROM translations) are in fact illegal. But Berne is a load of crap mostly, according to it using Bablefish is also illegal.

This is one of those issues where you tend to judge using your own values, translations are great for us gamers and generally good for the companies who own the games we translate. I'd say the English patches for Sekien Densetsu 3 and Tales of Phantasia are responsible for a reasonable chunk of those game/series' fans, those two examples just being the first translation projects I followed.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works actually states that any unauthorised translation (aka all ROM translations) are in fact illegal. But Berne is a load of crap mostly, according to it using Bablefish is also illegal.

This is one of those issues where you tend to judge using your own values, translations are great for us gamers and generally good for the companies who own the games we translate. I'd say the English patches for Sekien Densetsu 3 and Tales of Phantasia are responsible for a reasonable chunk of those game/series' fans, those two examples just being the first translation projects I followed.

Wow, your just like Wright. Using they law, then insulting it. Nice name.

 

[Mentz]

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works actually states that any unauthorised translation (aka all ROM translations) are in fact illegal.

But you know that all unofficial games translations are "de facto" tolerate by software house...