As I understand the law (and it varies between states):
1. Emulators that contain no propriety code are generally allowed. Strictly they shouldn't be, but they are usually for such old systems that little attention is paid. The system part of the ROM comes in the ROM files which you can acquire from other sources than TMO.
2. Emulators that contain propriety code (e.g. a PSX emu with built in system ROM files) would be disallowed.

In the Maemo.org repos there are only types of 1. emulators AFAIK

So vice and maybe ati85? Could you tell the full list so that we don't have to go digging and guessing?

I've never seen a rom in the repositories, only emulators which are legal as far as i knew

There's also a question of how to handle this - I've just had a look through the extras and -testing emulators and can't see any that obviously include any roms, so the only current fremantle example I can clearly see is vice.
The problem with this is that as vice has never been promoted into -testing from -devel, it's never hit the testing queue, so QA hasn't been done on it. As QA testing is only done at the -testing stage, technically there doesn't seem to currently be any mechanism in place for preventing proprietary content from being loaded into -devel and staying there.

If the Vice example is true, it needs to be pulled, plain and simple.

Indeed. However, we shouldn't jump to conclusions about all emulators (although the burden of proof probably falls on the packager): some systems have their ROMs available for use in emulators; others use reverse engineered ROMs which don't contain code copyrighted to the original manufacturer, but instead are clean room implementations (e.g. DOSbox with FreeDOS)

I didn't want to make this a witch hunt, which is why i was hesitant to start naming names. I just wanted a clarification on the position regarding proprietary content. Please don't turn it into a witch hunt...

How about the testing squad go through the emulator threads/packages sequentially and check them? It should be pretty obvious which include proprietary material. I'm talking about all emulators, not just game console emulators.

FWIW MAME claims to contain no proprietary content, it's all reverse engineered.

great so now we start to see psx..other emu's be taken off now...what a joke..this will just hold back any further progression and more than likely alienate any other people who want to help develop or update apps for us.
i will support and have donated to most of these emu's that have been compiled for n900..yet we never had this hassle on the previous maemo's.

nice going!!

flame away

Well, not the PSX emulators as they don't actually ship the BIOS files with them.

That said, I do find all this Internet lawyer **** hilarious. I certainly could not give two fücks if the emulators come with BIOS files. At best, the person who has included them has saved me from doing a Google.

Come on qwerty12. You know full well this isn't "internet lawyering"-- it's once burned, twice shy. Do you really want a repeat of the last copyright debacle? We almost lost zerojay as a contributor due to the frustration he needlessly went through.

Most emulator providers are doing the right thing, and it's easy: don't include proprietary objects with your package. Done. Tell customers to get acquainted with Google.

How is that an issue?