What's interesting is that generally nobody cared about these ROMs for a decade or two, and now that there has been a resurgence of retro gaming consoles and apps, suddenly the IP enforcers have started to arrive. I'd bet that many of these ROMs would have been completely lost if not for the emulation scene. I have no evidence for this, but I would make a conjecture that the copyright holders are probably using at least a few ROM dumps that they found online for their own "new" products...