First, please take into consideration that lemmy.world website and organisation is bound to EU laws (as stated in the TOS). As such, in the current case the EU copyright laws, that are as previously stated, far more restrictive than the US ones.

As you stated, the objective of ROM patches is to modify copyrighted material. One of the right protected by copyright in the EU is the right to modify a software.

By default, if no licence is given, software is considered as being under the most restrictive licence available (even if the source code is freely available), which means, in this case, an "all rights reserved" licence, which prohibit software modification.

In the EU, third party patches are considered as derivative works, and requires an explicit authorisation from the copyright holder to be published and used on copyrighted material. Some exceptions exists, as previously stated, but applying them here would be quite far fetched.

For now, and while I keep researching on the application of EU copyright laws to try to find a flaw that would allow me to authorize those links, I'll have to keep those links removed.

The comments would be restored if the link are removed by the comment authors.