SvennoJ said:
Not quite So you can't play Kirby's Adventure anymore, even though you paid for it in 1993? Not legally, no. What you bought twenty-something years ago was a game cartridge, not a right to always have access to the game that was stored on it. And as horrid and draconian as that sounds, there is - sort of - an argument for why that should be the case. "From an IP perspective, you are seeking to consume content which you can't have any other way, and that's understandable from a consumer perspective, but that's not a privilege consumers own," Purewal says. "Consumers don't have the right to enjoy content for free just because the content isn't available in any other way. Now, from a practical perspective, the fact that there's no-one there to enforce those rights may be an indication that no-one will come after you in reality. But that's just down to how things work in practice; it's not a legal defence. |
Hmm, okay, to clarify, software emulation is not illegal in and of itself provided no intellectual property is being infringed upon. In the case of video game emulation, that would be the exe code used to run a given game. So, an unofficial emulator has to utilize its own language to be able to read the same code found inside a video game file.
Its also not illegal to back up copies of a given physical media. You have to A) have already purchased the piece of media (music, movies, games). B) be ripping data straight from the media. This means that you technically can't be ripping your data from a file off the internet. It needs to come from the actual cartridge, CD Rom or whatever physical medium you purchased it on. Downloading a complete game file off the internet is illegal if that game isn't being handed out for free by the IP owner or some sort of promotion. Torrent applications sidestep this because you are not downloading the complete file from one given source, but rather broken/incomplete chunks of the file through various sources scattered across the world that together makes the file complete. This is essentially a loophole in US copyright law and the reason why we are allowed to torrent here in the states. It's legal, but it's abused.
All of this will inevitably be a thing of the past with DRM and a digital only future moving forward. When you physically buy a game, you are buying the license to use, modify or back up that file. Obviously you cannot redistribute. When you are buying a game digitally, you are essentially leasing that file indefinitely but do not have the right to copy or modify that file. This is what digital rights management is all about, and we're seeing physical games start to incorporate DRM through an always online environment.
It is completely legal to download an open source emulator from the internet, and play copies of games you personally purchased and backed up yourself, provided the format was physical. DRM is a different can of worms and applies to software acquired digitally, but again adheres to its own subset of copyright law. It's much less consumer friendly but also the future.
