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[Griffen37]

Yeah, that's a sticky issue too.  Consumers have won in court over the right to time shift and media shift copyrighted works -- Transfering a TV program to a VHS tape, recording a CD onto cassette to play it in the car.  The problem is that none of those things had technological impediments to the transfer that had to be circumvented to enable the shift.  Games do.  Thus, you are, arguably, violating the DMCA when you back up a game and copy it to a new medium.  That discussion is above.

As for the moratorium, I'm not too familiar with it, but if people talk about it, my guess would be so as not to step on the arcade revenues and to make it less worthwhile for the creators to want to come after you.  Also, newer arcade games can't be emulated b/c the hardware is too fast for adequate emulation, so if you are just talking about why you can't get any games that are less than two years old, that's why.  Either way, since very few people purhase arcade games, it is illegal to get a copy no matter how long you wait unless, of course the copyright owner voluntarily donates the work to the public domain after 2 years, then everything changes.  (Oh, and once again, all of the above is in reference to U.S. copyright law).