Legal Question

[MayImilae]

To answer that, I'll cover some ground first. Specifically First Sale Doctrine and Format Shifting law cover typical Dolphin user's usecases, not Fair Use. First sale doctrine means that when someone buys something, the previous owner loses their rights to it and the new owner can do whatever they wish with it, including sell it to someone else where it happens again. Format Shifting is the rule that covers transferring the game into a new format, such as dumping it in Dolphin. Those two things combined allow users to purchase copyrighted works and then dump them for use in Dolphin, and that is not piracy. Fair Use, on the other hand, only applies to confirmed copyright violations where the court deems the use fair and not punishable. For example, a museum letting thousands of people play a game they have stored there is technically piracy, but it is Fair Use.

TKSilver Wrote:What I was stating is that his friend upon loaning him the game makes him the "owner" of the game disk for the length of time he borrows it.

That is not a legal transfer. The original owner still has all rights to the work, and you are using something you do not legally own, therefore it is piracy.

As for fair use, I'm assuming you are thinking of De Minimis, aka it's not enough of a violation for courts to bother with it. However that is not related to the scale of the piracy, but the use of the copyrighted work by the one who pirated. Aka, if you borrowed a friend's copy to play a few levels to see if you wanted to buy it or not, then immediately returned the game, that is solidly De Minimis. If you borrowed the copy and played through the entire game, that is not De Minimis, that is just piracy. So no, there isn't really any defense if they were to catch you borrowing a friend's game and playing it all the way through (especially with format shifting, which is a right reserved to the current owner).

That said, it is extremely unlikely that the copyright holder would know it happened, let alone that they'd bother to sue you for piracy at that small of a scale.

This can all very easily be avoided by just buying it and then they buy it back later. That is technically the legal way to do it.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I just read a lot ok.

[Shonumi]

Quote:Format Shifting is the rule that covers transferring the game into a new format, such as dumping it in Dolphin. Those two things combined allow users to purchase copyrighted works and then dump them for use in Dolphin, and that is not piracy. Fair Use, on the other hand, only applies to confirmed copyright violations where the court deems the use fair and not punishable.

Actually, format shifting is a specific example/application of the Fair Use doctrine. The rule itself comes from RIAA v. Diamond if I recall, and Fair Use is cited as the basis.