Be Excellent To Each Other

Just a quick question, I thought I'd ask due to Mr. Gaywood's post in Runcle's XP Thread.

How much are we "allowed" to say regarding naughty copies of Product X before the Mods (perhaps quite rightly) move and delete posts?

I'm aware some of you are software devs and would be mighty angry if someone were to copy your bread'n'butter work, but equally people are chatting about ROMs, MAME, hacking iPhones, etc.

Any guidance or words of wisdom, before someone says something someone else deems out of line?

MAME and hacking an iPhone isn't illegal. The ROMs themselves are in a grey area of course, but the general rule of thumb on another forum I frequent is that you can talk about ROMs (and other related things) for anything that is no longer commercially available.

Although of course that could be completely different here.

Quite. The thing about MAME ROMs though is that in the eyes of the law, it's no different to copying anything else you don't have a licence to use, AFAIK.

I just didn't want to get any of the hosters/mods in trouble like, or start an argument so I thought I'd ask first. In my eyes if we can link to MAME ROMs we can also link to torrents of Windows XP (unless you happen to own the arcade cab and have permission to download the ROM).

The iPhone thing was maybe a bad example, I was under the impression the softmod being performed was fiddling with the OS which would be a naughty thing to do. If not, then just forget I mentioned iPhones

If people are after a specific thing and they're having trouble finding it via the regular [standard commercial outlets] then offering them a link in a PM would be preferred, I think. I don't think we want to be putting ourselves across as promoting the aquisition of things in a way that would be strictly illegal by posting links directly in the forum.

That said, anything that isn't copyrighted or for which the copyright owner has freely granted rights to distribute and publish is fair game.

This is a discussion point, not a ruling - something will be put in the rules thread regarding this once consensus is reached.

Mmm. Similarly, the really cool thing that was I going to upload, that I mentioned in that badly thought-out 'Special Offers' thread of mine? It's been completely unavailable in any official form for years. Its rights ownership has been problematic.

Guess what! It comes out on DVD this year! As recently announced, apparently only weeks before I found The Lost Hard Drive with it on! Which is both awesome and really fucking irritating to me. Tempted to upload it anyway just as 'proof' of my plan. Which is why I'm not mentioning it by name.

How do folks feel about this specific example?

Is it nuclear warhead schematics? If so, probably keep it to PM.

We need a communist dictator dimlie.

I don't think there should be any moderation regarding discussion of this sort of thing. We're not affiliated with anyone who could take punishment for this discussion, and so long as we're not hosting pirated material there's nothing that can be done about it. Piracy is illegal, talking about it in astonishing detail isn't.

999 Gulags/1000

Detail is fine, I'm not so sure about direct links, though.

Also:

/waves

You need to be vaguely careful, especially if the site attracts newbies, that this place doesn't just turn into some UKNova clone or anything daft like that though. It's attention (and a kind of people) you just don't want.

As Grim... said, discussion is absolutely fine. Linking possibly not so much.