Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

il make it my duty to warn users from now on then. in most cases a warning is all it takes (for me anyway)

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

good topic title though. this will imform more people of the rule than the other sticky post. i thought it was a great new ovi game lol

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

I really appreciate the more restrained tone in last your post :)

Off topic - but
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=48464

This is just one thread as an example. I couldn't see a rule against making fun/belittling a newbie for a genuine question, but shouldn't that be implicit for everyone. Sure I could pass it off as friendly banter.. But that's not what it is.

Can I expect a friendly reminder from mods in situations like these too? Or does this not fall inside Russian Roulette :p

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

I really don't understand the fact that maemo.org

a) bans people asking for/distributing copyrighted game rom images and at the same time
b) distributes plenty of copyrighted home computer rom images via its main repositories

Can somebody please explain to me why one is a big no go and the other one is just ok? .

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

It is illegal to swap and share roms. It's arguably legal to use roms on a different device if you own them and have an appropriate licence.

The images you refer to are showing the latter, and not advocating anything illegal. They are showing single images from those roms which is legal under the 'fair use' laws, which allow a certain percentage to be published (is it 5%?)

If maemo.org were seen to be promoting, encouraging or even allowing the sharing of roms, the relevent companies would initiate lawsuits to shut the place down. It's not worth it, given that there are plenty of other places on the net you can have those discussions (they keep moving to avoid prosecution).

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

Oh no! He's on to my sneaky plan! ;)

I and the other mods will give warnings and/or bans to people that are especially vulgar and/or offensive, and make a note of it in the moderator forum so we all know the user has had a problem already in case it comes up again.

Again, it's a case where everyone is welcome to ask others to not be rude. If they respond to that in a rude way, it's probably time to notify a moderator.

It's a good question and i actually posted in the calculator emulator thread asking if it was really a good idea to be distributing the ROMs from the repos. I was told nicely to go soak my head, so i left it alone. I would prefer to not see anything in the repos that is illegal, even if it's not something likely to draw legal action.

The shift of emphasis in this forum has me questioning spending more time working on the MAME emulator, and i will probably redirect my focus back to FOSS games that everyone can enjoy without needing to buy or break the law. This post in another emu thread states the idea in a similar way to my new feelings on the matter. Emulators are awesome, but it seems to be where all the interest and effort is being directed, and i don't think that's healthy for Maemo.

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

The vice emulator (being just one example) is distributed by maemo.org incl. the complete set of rom images of the entire family of commodore 8 bit home computers incl. all rom images used in peripherals like the floppy drives. We are talking about the entire machine code of an entire generation of computers from the 80s.

Just out of couriosity: Where do you have your "knowledge" from? Who speads this "this is only 5%" nonsense?

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

Last time I looked, which admittedly was a while ago, maemo.org was distributing emulators but not roms.

It appears that this is no longer the case, which it seems our even games mod himself is uneasy about:

I confess I share his reservations. One can only hope that the relevant copyright owners will not be too bothered.

The principle of ‘fair use’ is an element of the copyright laws, and covers how much of someone else’s material you may legitimately quote (appropriately attributed). It is the law under which your blog post about the film you saw last night may contain images or a short clip from the film, but not the entire movie. I thought I had made it clear that I think the rule of thumb generally used is 5%. In reality, use of much less might still constitute an infringement, depending on how significant the material is.

Where did I get this information? 8 years as a moderator and admin in a Star Trek Community. And yes, Paramount are very hot on suing if they feel their copyright is infringed. ;)

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

My question wasn't where you got the 5% value from (although it's interesting that you refer to yourself as the source of that number). My question was why you think that only 5% of the rom images are being used. What exactly are 5% of a rom image and how do you expect emulators to work with 95% missing? This really sounds like you just made this up which is a strange thing given the fact that you derive legeal advise from this.

Anyway: I'd suggest t.m.o to
- stop shouting at/banning people for asking for roms while maemo.org is actually distributing them
- you tag all related threads with "hipocrisis" so one can easily ignore these "what others do is wrong, what i do is necessary" threads

Re: TMO Russian Roulette
 

I'd suggest you go and raise this very legitimate issue in the Community section of t.m.o. where it can be discussed and acted on by those who have power to do something about it. It's got nothing to do with people pirating Rovio's software and is outside the scope of this thread at this point. This thread is about enforcing existing rules on t.m.o. Games, not policing what goes into the repos.

Edit: Did it myself.