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SuperNova on 21 October 2017
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FromDK said:
Pemalite said:
The legalities depend on what country you are in.

In general... Emulation itself is perfectly legal.
And if you own a WiiU copy and drop it into your PC's disc drive and run it that way, that is also legal in most western nations.

Some countries like my own legally allow you to make duplicates of the media you already own.

Now where things get tricky is if you own a Switch copy of the game... Sadly you cannot drop that into your Disk Drive and go from there due to the lack of a Switch-cart port on PC.
Now if you were to torrent the game... Then you are also uploading chunks of the game, spreading the piracy of that particular copy, which is illegal.

That's not totally right.. becourse you have to own the hardware to play it on also.. even if you not use that hardeware..

It's not legal to go to gamestop and buy a used copy (or new for that matter) of a ps1.. wii.. whatever console game.. and then go home and rip it.. and then play in an emulator.. if you only own a pc..

But if you have a old ps2.. and have a backup.. and your ps2 then dies.. its legal to play on other hardware.. becourse you have right to play that game.. but its not legal if you never have had the hardware that can play it..

At least in the US owning the original hardware has nothing to do with it. It is literally how permalite stated. As long as you own a legitimate copy of the CD and you don't make a dump, but have the emulator straight up playing it from the CD (or installing from the CD but not playing it without it being put into the diskdive), you break no copyprotections and are perfectly within your legal rights.

What you are referrring to, is specifically about dumping within the purposes of backup copy. The legislation pertaining to that varies drastically between countries. But rule of thumb is: If you break a copyprotection by doing the dump (hint: this applies to most movies and games, but not music cds) then it's illegal. As far as I know, even then you don't have to have owned the original hardware.