Billy,
Like Nick, I'm not trying to be a dick or attack you, but Nruva is stating the honest-to-goodness truth. What seems logical in reality often goes completely against the logic of law.
But here's my opinion, expanding on Nruva's:
- the Copyright owner of that proto has the discretion to sue to get it back. Would it? Almost 100% no -not worth it. The only thing they would probably sue for is if a SNK v. Capcom proto somehow got on the market.
- Unfortunately, in law, just because you bought it legally from an operator doesn't protect your possession of the actual game if anyone in the chain of possession got it illegally and it can be proven. Here's how such a nightmare situation would work:
-- the copyright holder of the game proves that the game was never officially released for sale and thus there was no intention for it to be let out of the possession of the original cart owner. This would create a "per se" ("on-its-face") situation where, regardless of whether the current possessor/owner got it legally or not, the cart itself is wrongfully possessed.
-- A court would have little choice but to award such an obvious per se item back to its original owner. However, the person who it's taken away from would not be without legal remedy: that person can sue the person he bought the game from for the cash, and the seller can sue the person who sold it to him, and so on until either it reaches the person who got it illegally or the statute of limitations bars any recovery (that depends on how the statute works in that state, sometimes it doesn't start running until a person actually knows about the possible legal action).
So, in the unlikely event that a proto title-holder (based off copyright) goes after you, you may have an open chance to get reimbursed from the person who sold it to you -depending on certain legal situations. Would that happen? Doubtful. As I said, I am certain that for every proto that's out and about, there is probably another copy being held in a storage room at the legal copyright holder's facility.
I personally don't think you have anything to worry about. The only reason Dion was nailed was because SNK/Playmore wanted to nail him on every count that was available at law (he wreaked their wrath for totally different reasons). Just be careful with relatively recent releases.
Hope that makes sense without seeming "damning", because that's hardly what I'm trying to do -I just want to clarify the way the law tends to work in this area.
<small>[ July 14, 2003, 01:02 PM: Message edited by: Bobak ]</small>
