Legality of downloading Dizzy games?

I'm posing this question with the greatest of respect, as yolkfolk.com is an excellent resource for anything Dizzy related and I truly appreciate all the time and effort that has gone into preserving the legacy of one of my favourite game series.

I am wondering why yolkfolk.com can offer downloads of the original Dizzy games, when Codemasters have denied sites such as World of Spectrum from doing so. I've searched the forum but not come up with anything other than it seems they were not always available to download here, as per this post by Dizzy in 2011:

https://www.yolkfolk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=20459#p20459 Although, it is illegal for anybody online (outside The Oliver Twins and Codemasters) to distribute the series, you may find by searching through Google some sites that offer the series for download. Can anyone provide an official answer to this?

Hi
Very good question. We host the game roms as preservation as we have a good relationship with both Codemasters and The Oliver Twins.
If either party wanted us to remove the roms, then we will without question.
However, both parties know the existence of the site and know how the site has helped and continue to keep Dizzy alive. Even in helping produce NEW/OLD titles such as Wonderland Dizzy.
We also host the back catalogue of The Oliver Twins games as an archive as homage to them. Again, they are aware of this.

We do our best to comply with all official parties.

Hope this helps.

Andrew (Dizzy)

Thanks for the detailed reply Andrew.

Everything you say is reasonable and hopefully Codemasters and the Oliver Twins continue to appreciate the role you play in maintaining some value to the Dizzy IP. Keep up the eggcellent work! Sorry, I couldn't resist... {dizzy}:lookup:

My understanding (British law at least) is if you own the original physical copy of a game, then it's legal for you to have a ROM image because that would count as having a backup of it (backups for personal use are legal).

People involved in the process of making the games take time and skills for the project to be successful. They foresee making monetary gains out of the production and marketing of the project. The Dizzy games are therefore protected by copyright law to prevent them from being copied, reproduced or resold without the owners permission. It is illegal to download the games which have copyrights. Distributing the copyrighted games without the express permission of the owners is also illegal. Distribution of the games should only be done by The Oliver Twins and Codemasters.

You're missing the point Roosje when you just quote the basics of copyright law. The original Dizzy games on this site are not available for download and further distribution which would break copyright law. These games are available to play on-line only, and as Andrew pointed out in an earlier post, both Codemasters and the Oliver Twins are fully aware of this and as such have given their implicit agreement.

In the UK an individual back up of a purchased computer game is currently still legal for the purchaser, but that doesn't mean they 'own' the game, they have been granted a licence to use the product, which you mostly still have to agree to when installing a game from a DVD or a download; not forgetting that Licencing Laws are just as complicated as Copyright Laws :wall:

[quote data-userid="279" data-postid="88343"]

The original Dizzy games on this site are not available for download and further distribution which would break copyright law. These games are available to play on-line only

[/quote]

The original Dizzy games are available to download from this site. I tried it when I posted in February and just tried it again now. You can download ROM images for a wide range of systems. As an example, Fantasy World Dizzy has had over 20,000 downloads per system:

-- attachment is not available --

[quote data-userid="1939" data-postid="88405"]

The original Dizzy games are available to download from this site. I tried it when I posted in February and just tried it again now. You can download ROM images for a wide range of systems. As an example, Fantasy World Dizzy has had over 20,000 downloads per system:

[/quote]

The download numbers are meant to be a lot less than 20,000 as all the counters on the games database have been broken for some time.