Because emulation is legal. It shouldn’t have to be hidden. This was taken through the courts in 2001 with the Sony vs Bleem lawsuit.
What appears to be happening is Nintendo is abusing its power and money to make threats of legal action that these groups just can’t afford to fight, even though they haven’t done anything illegal. It should be coming as a surprise that Nintendo is coming for them, because this is completely legal, and not some fan game using Nintendo IP (which is what they normally shut down).
That sounds like grounds for some kind of legal action. Antitrust? Class action? I don’t know the specifics of the best strategy for approaching it, but if Nintendo is showing a pattern of using their legal team to harass legally operating emulator developers that sounds like something that should be actionable.
From what u understood It’s a bit more complicated than that. Emulation is rather not illegal and in very thin ground.
This is like if a pedestrian gets struck by a car while on a crosswalk. Yeah, they were allowed to be there… but they should have looked both ways before crossing the street.
This is a case of people being idealistic rather than practical.
Incidentally, this is a perfect example, because the automotive industry ran a series of ad campaigns to change public sentiment after cars got more common and children and elderly citizens started dying in the streets.
Nintendo is working equally hard to change public sentiment against the innocent.
Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
You’re talking about blame assignment, but I am instead referring to the fact that in both the Nintendo and the automotive example that somebody got smacked because they weren’t careful enough.
Emulation might be legal, but it’s software specifically designed to run illegal copies of the games.
I dislike Nintendo, but I can’t blame them for taking down that kind of software development. They’re still selling many of their old games through their own store for their own emulators. They’re perhaps charging way too much for it and/or lock it behind a subscription wall, even if you ever bought the original copies. Absolute garbage business practice, but from the corporate point of view I can see why they go after emulators. Especially since it’s easier to take those down than trying to go after all digital emulator copies of the games (if not impossible).
They’re probably gonna try and set an example to scare off others trying to make new emulators too.
Edit: lol people really are shooting the messenger here.
Also, the amount of excuses that people have to make backups of their already purchased games is very weak. You damn well know that a vast majority of people don’t use it for such reasons, the amount of people that still own original copies, and also have the hardware to even extract software for personal use must be like less than a percentage of the entire community using emulators. They’re just people pirating games they never paid for. It’s very naive to assume otherwise.
That may be the main reason why people use or even create emulators, but there are still legitimate uses for emulators. It’s like banning couples from riding the same motorcycle because two people on a bike is usually a robbery.
To be fair, it’s software specifically designed to run digital backups of what’s supposed to be personally owned media. It just so happens that it’s very easy to obtain a copy otherwise, but there’s nothing inherently illegal about it or the games.
Strong arming independent projects, and individual developers especially, that are very careful to not endorse that, effectively holding them accountable for others, is morally questionable at best.
From a theoretical point of view, emulators of modern consoles may actually be illegal. Under the DMCA, emulation for preservation is protected as a periodically-renewed exemption list defined by the library of congress. But, (paraphrasing) “creating or distributing any hardware or software device—or component of such—designed to circumvent DRM technology” is still illegal irrespective of any exemptions. A reasonable (and bullshit) interpretation of that means that any emulator which is capable of bypassing any DRM features (such as decrypting ROM using user-provided keys) is a violation under the act.
I say theoretical because it hasn’t ever actually been tested in a court. Nintendo v. Tropic Haze LLC nearly gave us the answer, but the latter chose to settle instead.
I can’t blame them for taking down that kind of software development.
Your not being able to blame them is completely irrelevant. Nintendo can not like stuff all it wants. The question is if it is LEGAL. If it is, and it is, your defense of their actions is a defense of the argument that they should be above the law because they don’t like something, and that’s an absolutely TERRIBLE position to take. You don’t need to white knight for Nintendo. They have more money than God and taking up their fights for them against your own rights as a consumer is so far beyond Stockholm Syndrome that I don’t think we even have a word for it yet.
Feel like you failed to read and grasp what I said.
Never said I agreed with what they’re doing, I am not white knighting them. I frankly don’t give a shit what Nintendo does and doesn’t and what they’ll lose over it.
I was just stating an observation from a business point of view.
It’s also legal to own guns in some countries, doesn’t make it legal to use it to just shoot at anything, and it’s even more ridiculous to assume that everyone buying/owning guns has good intentions. There are many countries where owning a gun isn’t legal, as well as making copies of products you’ve bought, even for personal backup.
And to believe that people use emulation exclusively for their own backups is insanely naive.
