An anonymous reader writes to point out a: a, playable in your browser using. From the blog post announcing this extension of the already mind-blowing Internet Archive: 'Like the Historical Software collection, the Console Living Room is in beta – the ability to interact with software in near-instantaneous real-time comes with the occasional bumps and bruises. An army of volunteer elves are updating information about each of the hundreds of game cartridges now available, and will be improving them across the next few days. Sound is still not enabled, but is coming soon. Faster, more modern machines and up-to-date browsers work best with the JSMESS emulator.' Legally, it isn't a grey area: It's civil infringement at the very least. The only area in which the 'not freely available' may come into play would be deciding upon the damages.
If there is any copy-prevention technology involved or if you accept payment in any manner for distributing the roms, including accepting other infringing data in return (ie, using a torrent client) then it's also a criminal offense in the US under the DMCA and NET Act respectively. On the other hand, screw the law. It's an unfair, counterproductive, rampantly abused law resulting only from a century of corporate lobbying and I have no respect for it whatsoever. That only exempts them from the anti-circumvention provisions. Plain old copyright law still applies. A lot of the old games will have effectively lapsed now simply because their owning legal entities ceased to exist, but confirming that poses quite a challenge itsself.