Emulation - The Legalities, Ethics, Benefits and Drawbacks

[SvennoJ]

I missed this before, very well written article on the ethics and legalities of emulators
http://www.pcgamer.com/the-ethics-of-emulation-how-creators-the-community-and-the-law-view-console-emulators/
It also touches on the dangers of Cemu as a closed source project.

I can agree with most of that except this:
"Piracy is wrong," Cifaldi said when we talked over Skype. "It does hurt the industry. But I don't think blaming emulation is the way to go on that.… I can go buy rat poison right now. That doesn't mean I'm going to make someone drink it. So blaming the existence of emulation for piracy, I don't buy it. I don't buy that argument."

If 99% of buyers of rat poison use it to poison people, you bet your ass it would become illegal. Ofcourse I don't know how many people play pirated copies on emulator, yet it sure is a far larger percentage than those making people drink rat poison...


Anyway as long as usage is small (which it seems it is) no real harm done

It's impossible to prove how many people pirate games for the sake of emulation, but there are still countless ROM sites distributing games that have been on sale on Nintendo's Virtual Console or in re-releases like the Mega Man Legacy Collection. In Breath of the Wild's case, many illegal downloads could be headed for hacked Wii U consoles. Dolphin emulator developer Pierre Bourdon, who goes by the handle delroth, actually argued that a very small fraction of the gaming audience uses emulators. In the latest stable release of Dolphin, the development team added an opt-in statistics gathering dialogue that users encounter when they first run the emulator, asking to collect anonymous data. Obviously some users will decline, but Bourdon told me their numbers indicate around 50,000 daily users. For comparison, Nintendo sold around 20 million GameCubes and 100 million Wiis. If half of Dolphin's users opted in, that's still less than one percent of the console audience.