Nintendo never said that all emulation is illegal. Nintendo just does not like that their current gen is being emulated and lot of games are easily available on pirate sites for everyone. Otherwise Nintendo would have tried to shutdown emulators for previous systems too. They were especially worried about the Switch 2 being emulated easily with current emulators, as it doesn’t seen too different. I think that’s all to it.
However, there are still a number of ways that emulators can violate the law. For example, the Nintendo Switch has certain “technical restriction measures” that prevent it from playing pirated games. If a Switch emulator seeks to bypass those measures, it opens itself up to legal trouble.
Which law exactly? There are exceptions for making personal backup copies. So its not really court tested law and we don’t know if it violates the law. As the article said, these cases never went to court and we don’t have a decision by law. Nintendo did all of that out of court.
Which law exactly?
the paragraph after the one you quoted answers this question:
Note that this discussion was based on Japanese law, but the same language is found in the DMCA Section 1201(a)(1)(A): “No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” That law is more than 26 years old, going into effect a month after Google was founded, but the language remains in place.
It makes no sense to cite a little part of the US DMCA law if the discussion was based on Japanese laws. If you look at https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 , its much more complicated than one sentence. As for the DMCA, this is the next paragraph after the cited above one:
(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph ©.
I admit not really to understand, as the language is hard to read for me. It would even be hard in my native language. Does the Japanese law have such clauses and exceptions?
both the DMCA in the US as well as that Japanese law are implementations of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty. that is why they can be discussed in a fairly interchangeable way.
Nintendo went even further than that:
https://tech4gamers.com/nintendo-linking-emulator-trafficking/
And they absolutely have said that emulation is illegal in the past:
https://www.slashgear.com/1572585/are-video-game-emulators-illegal-answer/
On their website, they name emulators in a list of “illegal activities” they want people to snitch on:
To report ROM sites, emulators, Game Copiers, Counterfeit manufacturing, or other illegal activities
Those articles are wrong. Nintendo says Switch emulation is illegal, not all emulation is illegal.
They have always argued that emulating a current system is illegal, which makes no legal sense. Either every kind of emulation is or none.
Well well well That’s quite a switch in opinions
