Originally Posted by
Kiddo
To start, let's take this question into a scenario where there's no supposed illegality involved: Does Ted Woolsey own his localization scripts for the Final Fantasy games he worked on? Does Working Designs own the localization scripts for the games they worked on? If not, then why bother re-writing these in every re-release, especially as the fandom for said franchises gets more broken with every re-script?
Second off, I would like to add that there's more to many, if not most, fan translations than merely plastering a script over the Japanese text. Besides the text and graphics hacks required to get the translation across, many hacks go the extra mile and add degrees of polish such as extra fonts, enhanced graphics and effects, and bug fixes. Perhaps most dramatically, the Satellaview-based fan translations up to this point stripped out BS-X-specific code and replaced it's specific save format with a standard SRAM format, among other more specific changes on a game-to-game basis, which essentially amount to -porting the games from their originally released add-on hardware to the base Super NES.-