Emulators aren’t illegal if you have a legitimate copy of the game, and either plug it into your computer to play directly, or transfer your copy to your computer yourself (due to stupid DMCA technicalities, it’s not legal to download an identical premade file from the internet). The Switch emulators were shut down not because they were emulators, but because the developers were letting users talk openly about piracy in communities they ran, weakening their we’re only providing this for legitimate users and don’t want to help pirates defence, and, even more critically, they were sharing each other’s dumps of Switch games instead of dumping them themselves, giving Nintendo a we’ll sue you for pirating all these games stick to make shut down the emulator project the carrot they could offer in a settlement.
None of this invalidates the point of the post, though, as there are plenty of games where there were never enough copies in existence to cater to the current demand of players, so even if they were willing to spend extortionate amounts for used cartridges on Ebay, people still wouldn’t be able to play certain games without resorting to piracy.
Not necessarily… When the emulator includes proprietary pieces -bios/etc- it’s subject to copyright. Without said pieces it’s not much of an emulator… Iirc GBA emus fall into this
I am pretty sure a number of emulators do have reverse engineered bios that provide very good compatibility. I have some of those retro handhelds that run on ArkOS, and quite a few of the emulators in Retroarch do have that option. It’s not perfect, but works for most of the games I want to play.
Emulators for seventh generation consoles aren’t automatically legal like emulators for earlier consoles as that’s when consoles started directly supporting DRM. Under the DMCA (and equivalent laws in other countries, which those countries are required to have to have a trade deal with the USA, which they’re required to have if they want to participate in the global economy), devices that circumvent DRM are illegal, and obviously a seventh-generation-or-later console emulator has to circumvent the game’s DRM to make the game playable on hardware other than what the DRM is attempting to restrict it to. The DMCA also added exceptions to itself when you’re forced to violate copyright in some way to make different computer systems or software compatible with each other, e.g. if you need to reverse engineer something to figure out why it isn’t currently working. While there’s no settled case law yet, it’s widely believed that the interoperability exceptions override the anti-DRM-circumvention-device parts. That still requires that the goal of the emulator is to make legally-owned copies of games compatible with new hardware rather than to circumvent DRM in not-legally-owned copies of games, and it’s much easier to argue the former in court if you’ve not pirated anything and have been hostile to other people pirating things, so emulator developers who bother talking to lawyers are usually careful to make it clear that they don’t support pirates and accumulate huge collections of disks and/or cartridges.
Quite a bit of the world is locked into similar IP law due to various trading partnerships with western nations. A notable recent example is the, now defunct, Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Is that always true? It’s been a few years since I set up a Switch emulator but I recall needing device keys dumped from a physical machine to get it working, similar to ROMs. Would that put the emulator itself in a similar position?
Copyright law does apply to big numbers - any computer file is effectively just a really big number, and can be copyrighted, and this specific kind of cryptographic key, even if not copyrightable, still (potentially) counts as an illegal DRM circumvention device under the DMCA (and equivalent laws in other countries). Illegal numbers are a legal grey area as there’s no case law demonstrating that they’re legal yet, but it’s expected that if it ever ended up in court, they’d be determined to have been legal all along. Wikipedia lists a whole bunch of them on their illegal number article as they’re sufficiently confident they’re not going to lose a legal dispute. Big publishers benefit more from there being a legal grey area they can threaten people for operating in than they would from the potential gamble of getting lucky and having a court agree with them while risking the court might disagree and set a precedent they don’t like.
Emulators aren’t illegal if you have a legitimate copy of the game, and either plug it into your computer to play directly, or transfer your copy to your computer yourself (due to stupid DMCA technicalities, it’s not legal to download an identical premade file from the internet). The Switch emulators were shut down not because they were emulators, but because the developers were letting users talk openly about piracy in communities they ran, weakening their we’re only providing this for legitimate users and don’t want to help pirates defence, and, even more critically, they were sharing each other’s dumps of Switch games instead of dumping them themselves, giving Nintendo a we’ll sue you for pirating all these games stick to make shut down the emulator project the carrot they could offer in a settlement.
None of this invalidates the point of the post, though, as there are plenty of games where there were never enough copies in existence to cater to the current demand of players, so even if they were willing to spend extortionate amounts for used cartridges on Ebay, people still wouldn’t be able to play certain games without resorting to piracy.
The emulator is legal in all cases. The ROMS are what you need a ripper and copy of the cart for.
The above only applies to the USA. YMMV
The BIOS as well
Not necessarily… When the emulator includes proprietary pieces -bios/etc- it’s subject to copyright. Without said pieces it’s not much of an emulator… Iirc GBA emus fall into this
That’s why GBA emulators ship the proprietary parts separate. You’re on your own to track that down.
What if those are reverse engineered?
I am pretty sure a number of emulators do have reverse engineered bios that provide very good compatibility. I have some of those retro handhelds that run on ArkOS, and quite a few of the emulators in Retroarch do have that option. It’s not perfect, but works for most of the games I want to play.
Xemu is one of those, there are a few reverse engineered or otherwise nonproprietary bios options available
Emulators for seventh generation consoles aren’t automatically legal like emulators for earlier consoles as that’s when consoles started directly supporting DRM. Under the DMCA (and equivalent laws in other countries, which those countries are required to have to have a trade deal with the USA, which they’re required to have if they want to participate in the global economy), devices that circumvent DRM are illegal, and obviously a seventh-generation-or-later console emulator has to circumvent the game’s DRM to make the game playable on hardware other than what the DRM is attempting to restrict it to. The DMCA also added exceptions to itself when you’re forced to violate copyright in some way to make different computer systems or software compatible with each other, e.g. if you need to reverse engineer something to figure out why it isn’t currently working. While there’s no settled case law yet, it’s widely believed that the interoperability exceptions override the anti-DRM-circumvention-device parts. That still requires that the goal of the emulator is to make legally-owned copies of games compatible with new hardware rather than to circumvent DRM in not-legally-owned copies of games, and it’s much easier to argue the former in court if you’ve not pirated anything and have been hostile to other people pirating things, so emulator developers who bother talking to lawyers are usually careful to make it clear that they don’t support pirates and accumulate huge collections of disks and/or cartridges.
Quite a bit of the world is locked into similar IP law due to various trading partnerships with western nations. A notable recent example is the, now defunct, Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Is that always true? It’s been a few years since I set up a Switch emulator but I recall needing device keys dumped from a physical machine to get it working, similar to ROMs. Would that put the emulator itself in a similar position?
Cryptographic Keys are just long numbers and are not subject to copyright laws.
Copyright law does apply to big numbers - any computer file is effectively just a really big number, and can be copyrighted, and this specific kind of cryptographic key, even if not copyrightable, still (potentially) counts as an illegal DRM circumvention device under the DMCA (and equivalent laws in other countries). Illegal numbers are a legal grey area as there’s no case law demonstrating that they’re legal yet, but it’s expected that if it ever ended up in court, they’d be determined to have been legal all along. Wikipedia lists a whole bunch of them on their illegal number article as they’re sufficiently confident they’re not going to lose a legal dispute. Big publishers benefit more from there being a legal grey area they can threaten people for operating in than they would from the potential gamble of getting lucky and having a court agree with them while risking the court might disagree and set a precedent they don’t like.