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After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

They have always argued that emulating a current system is illegal, which makes no legal sense. Either every kind of emulation is or none.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It makes sense from argumentation standpoint, because Nintendo argues that there are protection mechanisms in the Switch that is illegal to ignore, in emulators. I don't know if this is true and you don't know either, because this was not tested in court. Nintendo never ever said that ALL emulation is illegal, which i stated in my initial reply. Otherwise Nintendo would go and take down ALL emulators. Not every kind of emulation is the same.

    In example the Dolphin emulator ships with keys extracted from the console. Some say its illegal to distribute these keys, others argue keys are not copyrighted and its not illegal to share, but it was never tested in court either. If Nintendo had a case, they would definitely go against that emulator, as the keys are in the source code in the open public. Nintendo never said that Dolphin or Wii and Gamecube emulation is illegal. Or any other prior console and emulator of Nintendo systems. Nintendo console emulators exist in the public since the 90s.

    Its much more nuanced than people are making or understanding. And lot of articles, like the one stated before, are plain and simple wrong and cite without context. And people who don't understand the situation take this and believe it.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Great comment!

    There's similar legal issues with the "right to a private copy" many European countries have. Those laws were made to allow people to make a copy of their media, in case the original breaks. Important to note is that those private copies weren't allowed to be distributed to anyone, not even lent to a friend.

    This worked well at the time for cassettes and VHS, which did break occasionally.

    But at some point most CDs came with copy protection, which got broken pretty quickly. But at least in Germany, they are still considered "working copy protection" and thus are illegal to circumvent, even for a otherwise legal private copy.

    The same is the case with Switch games: Copyright owners use copy protection to make otherwise legal use cases illegal.

    E.g. Nintendo made it so that Switch games can only be played by decrypting the ROMs, which is illegal for anyone except Nintendo.

    At least that's their standpoint which was never tested in court but it's not unlikely that it'd be accepted.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    But this is still to be discussed, because if the emulator does not circumvent any copy protection and the games are dumped with the protection in place, and the copy protection is reverse engineered, then the games would play with the copy protection decrypting. It does not circumvent the protection, it actively "uses" it. So from that standpoint making backup copies is not illegal in theory. Now would this hold in court? I don't know. Nintendo does not know either and rather like to take things out of court. Because if Nintendo looses such a case, it would be devastating.

    I'm in Germany too and the right to a private copy is exactly what I had in mind too. Not all copy protection measures were accepted for the right to not copy. What I mean is, there was some extremely simple protection mechanisms that were not accepted as a working and effective copy protections, and you were allowed to do a copy; even with the so called copy protection in place. Therefore it effectiveness was kind of important to the discussion too. I guess the Switch has a much more advanced one, so its probably not an exception.

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