Homebrew

[Dreamcast99]

as so many people sell covers made from this site im not sure which one you classify the site as, and they sell them on e-bay reaching millions of viewers

[Zelimpdna]

Homebrew games tend to illegally use copyrighted material, and make money off them.

Feel free to post covers for homebrew games on this site, just as you can post covers for licensed games.

As for other people using covers from this site to make money, it would be a case where you criminalise the people doing the wrong thing (ebay sellers) not the resource. Similar to how you prosecute a speeding driver, not the car manufacturer or government for building a road.

[Zelimpdna]

Why are homebrew games not okay? Licenced roms I understand but homebrew games for obsolete systems are just hobby projects mainly.

The only ones I'm familiar with are Super Bat Puncher and D-Pad Hero. D-Pad Hero is a demake of guitar hero if you're into that kind of thing, and Super Bat Puncher is only a demo but it's REALLY impressive as an original homebrew game, and definitely should be checked out.

Homebrews use (not always, but most of the time) copyrighted images, characters or game engine.
in short we feel that puts us in too big risk

By this logic though every Mario or Zelda game needs to be removed from this site immedietly, they all use copyrighted characters and are backed by a major company with top notch lawyers, unlike homebrews.

If this site hosted actual games, then yes, definitely. Hosting covers, which are basically advertisements for games, tends to work in these companies favour.

[Dreamcast99]

Homebrew games tend to illegally use copyrighted material, and make money off them.

Feel free to post covers for homebrew games on this site, just as you can post covers for licensed games.

As for other people using covers from this site to make money, it would be a case where you criminalise the people doing the wrong thing (ebay sellers) not the resource. Similar to how you prosecute a speeding driver, not the car manufacturer or government for building a road.

Your explanation is a word for word reasoning why linking to another site would be perfectly acceptable though. it would be a case where you criminalise the people doing the wrong thing (the site selling games) (ebay sellers) not the resource (linking on this site).

[Zelimpdna]

But by linking, we would be 'promoting' or 'condoning' the site.

Similar to how we don't have a big link on the front page saying "Click here to pay ridiculous amounts of money to people on ebay for things you can just download here for free."

[Jeff]

I think we need to get some terminology worked out here. The naysayers in this thread are lumping rom hacks and homebrew into one word. Homebrew is unauthorized software written from scratch (or from another brewer's work) to run on a device. You can argue that they should get a licence for that, but the company honestly wouldn't care unless it's on a modern device, used for piracy (emulators, dumping games), or it imitates one of their products (but if you're going to do that you might as well just make a rom hack.) Rom hacks are a sub-type of homebrew where people edit roms and violate copyright laws. Most of the time the new code is uploaded as patch files, and to my knowledge are legal until they are applied onto a rom, but different communities have different rules and Arseen makes it clear what this place thinks about it.

I probably just stated the obvious, but maybe it will help clarify what I think DC99 wanted to get out of this thread.   I think homebrew is really interesting, so I hope by morning people are talking about neat homebrew instead of worrying about links and rom hacks.