After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal
After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal
After shutting down several popular emulators over the years, Nintendo's top IP lawyer just admitted that emulators are legal.
Stop posting this, it's a non-story, basic emulation is legal but encryption breaking and reproduction of software, which all their modern cases are built on, IS NOT.
That's what I always said here. They never said emulation was illegal, but all of those emulators started making it extremely easy to pirate. Worse they openly targeted current gen consoles, so it was way way messier on "preserving old games" when brand new games were almost immediately supported. It was pretty much begging Nintendo to take action by targeting brand new games
Exactly. I do not understand people defending this. An emulator playing games that are not even released, it’s a step too far. What’s the difference with piracy?
And I say this as someone using emulators on a regular basis for 15 years. Emulation is good (and necessary) for preserving video games, but the timing is important not to cross the (thin) line between « preservation » and « piracy ».
This leads to the same kind of erosion of free and open source software as Google taking down projects like youtube-dl on GitHub. The emulator code contains nothing illegal, neither does the developer community, but that's exactly what Nintendo is targeting, because it's the most effective way to shut down any project. The way Nintendo handles these cases is the problem and they have never cared if something is actually completely legal if they want it gone enough, like modding, romhacking or uploading videos of gameplay. At this point they've burnt so much goodwill that I'm hoestly surprised there are still people left willing to insist that Nintendo only goes after actual piracy.