so one thing i noticed in debates with friends over the recent takedown notices to romsites from nintendo was a clear cut level of knowledge that effected the opinion. They seemed to come down to one of these 'camps' so to speak:
1 - The totalitarian stance: Nintendo is fully within their rights to do this and that is the end of the matter.
2 - The conservationist stance: Nintendo is fully within their rights to do this, however this also effects games preservation with rom dumps often being the only way to preserve extremely rare games
3 - The tertiary market stance: Nintendo is fully within their rights to do this, however fan translations for games never released in my region are now gone and without learning a new language those games are now unreadable to me
Its a real muddy thing in general. It is entirely Nintendo's right to do so since almost every site was loaded with ads making money off at least the images of nintendos intellectual property before the debate of roms even comes into it. Preservation and translations are a different matter, to some people at least, but that seems to be more a personal morals type deal.
But theres one facet to this i havent seen brought up much: modded roms.
Often we think of mods as simply a downloadable file or folder for a pc retail release. You add in some new enemy, remove a weight limit on a character, stuff like that. Occasionally you get something different. The 'total conversion mods' that basically take the engine, reskin the assetts and import a new map. A very common fad in this regard was custom campaigns in left 4 dead about ten years ago -let that sink in and make you feel old- but aside from things like 'pokemon uranium' that again are technically bordering on if not copyright infringement there is still a few niches that lead to debate.
One of which i know the most from communities like "insanedifficulty.net" that got some attention during the dark souls boom. They were people that made mods for roms and isos or straight retail releases to make them harder. For people that relished the challenge and wanted some Ocarina of Time: Master Quest or Breath of the Wild: Master Mode for every zelda for example. a big hit being the total reblancing mod for Final Fantasy Tactics.
Now theres still no debate that these are dodgy in terms of IP rights and usage. But they are also an audience that seem to have no issue buying these games to support them. They just want a greater challenge than the set difficulty provides and found a workaround to revitalise a love for a game.
Now sadly a lot of those modded roms are gone. For example i own FFT on both PS1 and its PSP digital rerelease but i still downloaded the modded version to try a different mode. Now the sites that hosted it are starting to take stuff down and its only a matter of time.
My question is where do you think this line is drawn? I dont think anyone can argue a company is totally in the legal right to do what they want with their IP but how far into the modding idea does this go before it starts to get a bit more murky? what do you think?