SvennoJ said:
aLkaLiNE said:
In theory emulation is legal provided the person emulating already paid for a copy of said software.
In practice, that's mostly not the case. I'd (conservatively) wager that more than 50% of the people emulating on PC are doing so illegally through pirating without ever having paid for their own copy.
I personally see a huge problem with piracy and am of the mind that only a minority actually emulate legally (ie ripping game data from the cartridge or disc itself as a backup and then playing said back up on an emulator. All perfectly legal). But How many people seriously own the equipment to interface an SNES cartridge to a PC?
If the world functionally worked on the honor system and everyone could be trusted then there wouldn't be any concern over emulation. As it stands, an unquantified portion of people are straight up stealing money from developers/people that make their living off coding. In any medium, that is extremely gross to me. If I made a product of labor, passion and love, I'd want full control over how that's distributed. Only seems fair. Emulation allows people to bypass that step thanks to widely available files on the Internet.
I get why emulation is important. Game preservation being the biggest factor. That reason alone makes this topic tricky to handle. On one hand it is absolutely good to keep the history of gaming in tact where an IP holder might no longer be interested. On the other hand, a lot of electronic robbery takes place and the concept of emulation is widely abused. Emulation would be okay In a perfect world where it was used as intended - game preservation. That's not really the case though. I guess for me and you and everyone around us, we have to ask ourselves to use software like that responsibly.
Fwiw I have pirated as a teen without a job. That was years ago though, now I just pay for things I want.
edit: to straight up answer your question Palou, it would be legal for you to copy your Mario game and play it on an emulator. Morally, well, a forum board can't decide your morals for you. I don't think it'd be morally wrong since you've legally obtained your copy. Mileage may vary.
|
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.
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264
I've pirated tons of games too as a teenager. I could actually afford to buy (some) games yet I spend all my money on blank media, a gaming PC and partying in the weekend. Why pay for games if you rather spend that money of something else right?.. It was wrong, yet it seemed to be the norm back then. Frequent copy parties, swapping games at school, try out a dozen games an afternoon, buy more 3.5" disks for the next batch.
When I got a job in the software industry I quickly changed my habits, never pirated again. Then I got to deal with the software I made getting pirated and dealing with the hassles of drm during development.
Ofcourse emulating is not automatically piracy. Yet emulators are often used to facilitate piracy. I applaud the efforts of pscx2 to require actual game disks. Too bad that's not practical with cartridge or any pre CD era based games. Yet it seems Sony and Nintendo are doing their own work to preserve older games with ps now, virtual console, mini nes / snes, compilations. There really is no need to emulate Mario games for preservation, they're safe, really.
|
