No worries. Legalese is annoying as all hell. While not mutually exclusive, patents are more for hardware and copyright is more for software. (There will always be unique outliers, but it's a pretty good general approximation).
Licenses are also a separate entity. For a good deal of the older games based on movies or other intellectual property, the licenses allowing that IP to be used in a game only last for so long. An example of this is the game Punchout on the NES. It is wrong believed that Nintendo changed the game from Mike Tyson's Punchout to Punchout due to Tyson's rape accusations in 1990. That really had nothing to do with it. When Nintendo was releasing Punchout on the NES here in the states, they licensed the likeness and use of Mike Tyson to help promote the game as Tyson was the hottest up and comer on the planet at the time. They got it dirt cheap since he signed it before he really got big, but by the time the license ran out Nintendo knew they'd have to pay a FORTUNE to keep his name. So they decided not to do so.
Anyway, that was a bit tangential. With regards to obtaining ROMs from the internet, it must still be stated that it is against the law to do so. Whether a person cares about breaking that law is up to them. (99.9% of the people here won't give a crap about it and really have nothing to worry about with regards to punishment). Nintendo does indeed pursue people and they go at them HARD. Any place with the audacity to publicly offer ROMS, or even links to ROMS, will receive nasty letters from Nintendo. The folks who ran loveroms were sued by Nintendo and Nintendo won the case on all charges. Those folks are basically indentured servants to Nintendo for the rest of their lives.
Emuparadise.org used to be a very good site as well for ROMS, but after the circumstances with loveroms came to light the owner of that site removed everything in fear of also getting handed a $10,000,000 lawsuit and losing.
To find ROMs now, folks will need to scour the depths of reddit, dark web sites, etc. etc. They can still be found, but it will take some work like it did in the past.
Also, it's not a very good idea to post links to ROM sites, or tell people where to go to get ROMs here in these forums. If the owner of said IP were to come across a link to their property here on these forums, they have every legal right to take action against the owners of these forums and the people running it.
