Emulation - The Legalities, Ethics, Benefits and Drawbacks

[VGPolyglot]

Cerebralbore101 said:

vivster said:
We should remodel this into a gun control debate. I think the consensus is that if the majority of people does something bad with your product it should be banned.

I think we all agree that the majority of gun owners uses it to shoot people. Shooting people is illegal, so guns should be banned. Also any talk about guns. If you support guns then you support murder, it's simple, really.
And while we're at it ban all drugs including cigarettes and alcohol. The majority uses it irresponsibly and risks the lives and livelihoods of innocent people. If you support tobacco or alcohol you also support murder.

The problem with that argument is that the majority of gun owners in america don't use them to kill people. If most gun owners were running around killing people then banning guns would make perfect sense. And to be honest we should ban certain types of guns, just like we should ban certian types of emulation. Nobody needs a machine gun to hunt deer with, and likewise there's no need to make an emulator for Wii U a mere two and a half years after the console launched. Smoking has been banned in certain public places, and driving drunk is illegal. See how the law doesn't allow people to do specific things, when those things are applicable? And no, I never said that anybody that supports emulation supports piracy, so your analogy fails there too. But you don't understand the difference between "all emulators are pirates!", and "most people who emulate current gen console games are pirates, never paying for the software"

And how do you want to enforce it? You want to send a whole bunch of people who use emulators to jail? While we're at it, why not send every single person who has pirated anything to jail! Like the prisons aren't already overcrowded as is...