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Comment by voltagex_ | Hacker News Reader

From jhl in the forum thread:

>I, myself, am not going to release these ROMs. This isn't the first project where I've dumped a commercial object for some other purpose and been asked to share (see: shairport, for one), and after much thought I conclude - now, as then - that it's not the right thing for me to do in any project. There are legal and professional risks which I'm just not comfortable taking. That's not negotiable.

>But that's not to say I won't help you dump it yourself. I'll have a dump feature in the cart, and I'm sure someone will rapidly archive all the available systems.

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I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how "I didn't steal anything; I just broke open the safe and told others how to get the money" would get you of the hook.

There's an active hobbyist lockpicking community out there with plenty of instructional videos. One could nefariously apply these skills, doesn't make the video producers liable.

To add to this, there's a professional penetration testing industry & similarly their methods could be employed in a malicious nature

Well, it's a good thing you're not a lawyer then!

By analogy, if the original comment had been "I will not give you a copy of the copyrighted harry potter book, but I can teach you how to use a scanner if you'd like, and I'm sure someone else will scan it" would you say that teaching someone to use a scanner is illegal?

It's actually typically legal to make a backup of a copyrighted item you own for personal use if the original is damaged.

He's teaching people to do something that's typically legal, avoiding infringing copyright by redistributing himself, and commenting that it's quite likely others won't be so scrupulous; I don't see how anyone could reasonably fault him.

A scanner doesn't target a single (intellectual) property. This feature of this hack, on the other hand, would have only one use: dumping the ROM of a Sega Saturn.

I hadn't thought of the 'for personal use' defense, though.

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