Actually, in the UK, it IS illegal, as making private copies of copyrighted material is illegal. Source:
https://torrentfreak.com/itunes-is-illegal-under-uk-copyright-law-150805/
It's bloody insane, though, as it makes your system backups, Spotify, and iTunes (for example) illegal too!
Great government there. That makes virtually every last person in the country a criminal.... Backups are necessary to ensure data integrity (who hasn't had a hard drive or other device crash?) Any game, movie or CD is copied internally in order to send it to the CPU, D/A converter, etc. That means even the people making DVD players are breaking the law if it's worded as stupidly as you seem to indicate. Are complete morons running the government there?
No, the person hosting the server is responsible for it. In the case of the App Store, that's Apple. Apple isn't going to host the ROMs.
Where are you going to get the ROMs from legally? The answer is no where. With perhaps a few rare exceptions, you can't legally get them.
Apple knows that anyone downloading the app can only get the ROMs illegally, so they block it.
While 20 games aren't thousands, it's significantly more than a "few":
http://mamedev.org/roms/
Beyond those 20, one used to be able to purchase quite a number of legal roms from Starroms back in the early 21st Century, but it seems they went out of business. But that doesn't invalidate the ROMs many people already purchased.
Likewise, Hanaho included over a dozen legal Capcom roms with one of their $99 arcade sticks. Between the two and the above site, you could potentially have several dozen legal arcade roms without owning a single PCB board. Other companies like Atari have offered their own emulation game packs over the years. Whether owning them in one form entitles you to use the same equivalent Rom in MAME depends on the country you live in. The point is that there are more than a "few" legal roms out there and possibly many more if you own the PCB boards (readily available in many cases on eBay).
The difference with Safari is there's a huge number of movies and photos which you can legally access on the internet. Uploading a video or picture is trivial - Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube are full of videos and pictures which people have uploaded. Anyone with a tiny bit of experience can throw together their own website.
Dozens or thousands, does it really matter anywhere but in your imagination? I know of not a single world wide law that says something is illegal if even only ONE game is available. If things were illegal based on
potential illegal use, it would be illegal to buy a screwdriver.
What about C64 or Amiga emulation on new AppleTV? Atari 2600? Some of us own hundreds of games for those systems. I've got over 60 Intellivision cartridges sitting just a few feet away from me (nearly half of all made) for that matter. I'd love to be able to play those on my TV in the living room without having to drag out ancient hardware running at composite resolutions. Apple won't allow those emulators either.
Apple can't reasonably be expected to know what's legal from what isn't, but they know that it's perfectly reasonable to expect you to go and do legal things with the web browser.
I'm sorry, but that is not a legal argument. If there's even one legit use for a program, it's probably legal in most countries.
Not so with ROMs. There are a few ROMs in the public domain, but nobody cares about them (besides, if the ROM is in the public domain, there's probably source code for the game in the public domain too, from which you can probably build a native executable with much better performance. So no emulator is needed.)
Nobody cares about them? WTF are
you to decide what people
care about? I bought some of those games in the real world at real world money cost for the Colecovision (e.g. Looping and Victory) back in the early 1980s when I had a very limited allowance (as money I got at Christmas and birthdays as we were poor so I had no regular allowance) so don't tell me I don't care about them. I still love Looping on Colecovision and now being able to play the arcade version (which had speech) is quite the treat. A similar concept version of Circus (oddly called Circus Atari) was an Atari 2600 staple and had several imitation games on the Atari 2600 and C64 platforms.
Sorry, but it's completely unreasonable for most people to "build a native executable" for the source code of a given game. Building a "similar" game would not be the same as playing the actual arcade game, which is the entire purpose of an emulator right down to feeding it virtual quarters.
There is already a pinball emulator/simulator on the App Store (Pinball Arcade) and while the games aren't cheap by most other game standards (I've spent well over $150 on a few dozen pinball emulation/simulation combinations), to some of us it's well worth it to play games we used to be able to readily find in arcades and bowling alleys and now you're lucky to find a single game once in a blue moon.
Many of us would gladly buy all our favorite arcade games if they would offer them and there is no technical reason these companies couldn't offer Mame packs if they chose to (ala Starroms), but let's face it, other than a select few games (Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, etc.) there's relatively not a whole lot of interest in ancient arcade games world-wide. While a game like Time Pilot may mean something to me (another Colecovision staple back in the day), Joe Millennium probably has never even heard of it, let alone cares about it. It was the fear of many of the (even more obscure) games becoming landfill content and lost for all time that drove many of the authors of MAME to create it in the first place.
