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Forums - Gaming - Is emulating acceptable?

 

Title

Yes 126 47.19%
 
If the game is owned 62 23.22%
 
If both the game and console is owned 40 14.98%
 
No 39 14.61%
 
Total:267
S.T.A.G.E. said:
Pemalite said:

 

Based on my knowledge on copyright and patents my best guess is these emulators are not made in any country that adheres to US law.

By definition, there is a single country in the word that adheres to US law.

Not that there are many countries which would sign an international treaty based on such a business-centric law disproportionately affecting and punishing the consumer and its transgressor.

This is the reason I think your Paul Ryan and other libertarian republicans are so retarded. So eager to escape a possible overreach of government that they slip straight into another tyranny, that of big business and private initative.

 



 

 

 

 

 

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palou said:

I own both a wii and a copy of mario galaxy... 

Would it be acceptble (both legally and morally) to emulate the game on my PC.

Imo, you already gave them money for it, how you use the game is up to you.

Yerm said:
the the company doesnt lose money from it, then there is no harm in doing it

Basically. 



If I want to emulate or dump them to my systems. I'm fine with it. I bought them.



Pemalite said:
AlfredoTurkey said:
If stealing is acceptable, then sure.

How is that even a comparison? He isn't stealing. Console manufacturer/developer/publisher looses nothing.

SvennoJ said:
If you have gotten permission from the copyright owner, then sure.

That is not required either.

Super_Boom said:
  I know I certainly wouldn't feel confident defending myself that way in court...though I admit I haven't looked into the topic closely.

It's already been tested in court. Emulators won.

S.T.A.G.E. said:
Its never acceptable unless the IP holder says so. PC gamers done care though. MAME pushed on regardless.

Not true.

bonzobanana said:
Also if I buy a dvd does that mean I can download a high definition version of the same movie for free from a torrent. Many emulated games are massively enhanced over the original game.

Not an accurate comparison.

A better comparison would be buying a DVD and playing it in a Blu-Ray player.
It's taking a form of media and playing it on a hardware platform that it was never originally designed to operate on.

* Emulation is perfectly legal. Legal precedents have been set. Console manufacturers lost their court cases.

* Downloading the games from torrents is illegal. - But if you have the original CD/DVD/BD you can play it on PC anyway and make legal backups.

* Downloading a BIOS is also illegal.  But if it's reverse engineered/emulated/dumped it however is perfectly legal.

https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/795/what-exactly-does-the-law-state-about-emulation-and-roms
I'd like to add that the ONLY time that you can legally have a ROM is if it was 1) purposefully released into the public domain by the copyright owner, 2) was given or sold to you by the copyright owner, 3) has had its copyright expire (75 years after publication, i.e. no video games until well into this century), or 4) it is an archival copy that YOU created for backup purposes (it cannot be a downloaded copy)

Emulators (without copyrighted material) are perfectly legal. However bypassing copy protection to dump the ROMS or BIOS is in a legal grey area. Downloading is definitely out.

PSCX2 is about as legal as you can get as it reads directly of ps2 discs. However dumping the ps2 Bios to do so is still dodgy, not perfectly legal.

Morally it's not stealing, it's more akin to printing your own money. Nobody loses anything right? It's simply an activity that is tolerated as long as it stays small. It's not really worth going after until it becomes too popular. And then it might be too late as with the music industry and freemium games will be the future instead.

Here's a more recent article on emulators
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264


Anyway I don't buy this whole preservation argument. You should preserve the hardware as well, not just a copy. It's like, I'm preserving history by keeping a picture of the mona lisa! Poor excuse.



Pemalite said:
S.T.A.G.E. said:

How is it not true?  Its available but it is still stealing.  Trademarks are protected under the government for a certain amount of time until it is reestablished. Unless its done outside of the US its an outlawed version of a game. An outlawed copy in otherwords.

It's not stealing. You aren't necessarily duplicating or pirating anything if you have the original media on-hand.
You can drop a Playstation 2 DVD into your DVD drive... Fire up the Emulator... And you are emulating away.
No reproduction of any licensed or copyrighted software required.

I did touch upon all that in my post if you cared to read it.

I highly suggest you look at the legal precedents that were set with Bleem. Sony tried to sue Bleem and thoroughly lost their court case on every single account.

Ergo. Emulation is legal. The more you know.

Emulation by itself is perfectly legal. Downloading ROMs or copying them from the cartridges/discs however is illegal in most countries unless the copyright holder shares/sells them online, which is extremly rare.



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Legally, the emulators are legal, but downloading the ROMs aren't. You have to use the actual copy of the game or rip it yourself and not distribute online. Morally, though? I don't see anything wrong with it, especially for retro games, as they make as much money from sales of a used copy as they do from downloading an illegal copy.



Bofferbrauer said:

Emulation by itself is perfectly legal. Downloading ROMs or copying them from the cartridges/discs however is illegal in most countries unless the copyright holder shares/sells them online, which is extremly rare.

Which is exactly what I have stated. Just with more words.

VGPolyglot said:
Legally, the emulators are legal, but downloading the ROMs aren't. You have to use the actual copy of the game or rip it yourself and not distribute online. Morally, though? I don't see anything wrong with it, especially for retro games, as they make as much money from sales of a used copy as they do from downloading an illegal copy.

Ironically... Nintendo possibly used an illegally downloaded Rom on it's Wii store.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us




www.youtube.com/@Pemalite

SvennoJ said:

https://gaming.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/795/what-exactly-does-the-law-state-about-emulation-and-roms
I'd like to add that the ONLY time that you can legally have a ROM is if it was 1) purposefully released into the public domain by the copyright owner, 2) was given or sold to you by the copyright owner, 3) has had its copyright expire (75 years after publication, i.e. no video games until well into this century), or 4) it is an archival copy that YOU created for backup purposes (it cannot be a downloaded copy)

Emulators (without copyrighted material) are perfectly legal. However bypassing copy protection to dump the ROMS or BIOS is in a legal grey area. Downloading is definitely out.

PSCX2 is about as legal as you can get as it reads directly of ps2 discs. However dumping the ps2 Bios to do so is still dodgy, not perfectly legal.

Morally it's not stealing, it's more akin to printing your own money. Nobody loses anything right? It's simply an activity that is tolerated as long as it stays small. It's not really worth going after until it becomes too popular. And then it might be too late as with the music industry and freemium games will be the future instead.

Here's a more recent article on emulators
http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/are-game-emulators-legal-1329264


Anyway I don't buy this whole preservation argument. You should preserve the hardware as well, not just a copy. It's like, I'm preserving history by keeping a picture of the mona lisa! Poor excuse.

The Preservation argument holds true for archivists and game historians/librarians. While they also try to preserve all the hardware, there's simply no guarantee it won't break down anytime so they need to keep a copy for archiving and redundancy purposes. But these are generally the only onles who do so (there are some exeptions, like persons with a huge game library who wants to make sure their games survive even if their consoles fail - but that makes them basically game librarians also).

Of course, if an emulator is sold with legal ROMs (Amiga and C64 Emulators do this) then you can use them as you wish, but otherwise you're basically banned from using a console/arcade emulator.

DOSBox is a special case as it only emulates the OS (DOS 8.x) and legal DOS games can bought (especially on GOG.com), so these often come bundled together. Less shady Abandonware sites generally remove their download links of games which are comercially available anyway, and would be the only ones I would go to, as they're the only ones which do have some serious archiving intent - and those never offer any console games on their sites because they're simply not abandonware.



Pemalite said:
Bofferbrauer said:

Emulation by itself is perfectly legal. Downloading ROMs or copying them from the cartridges/discs however is illegal in most countries unless the copyright holder shares/sells them online, which is extremly rare.

Which is exactly what I have stated. Just with more words.

VGPolyglot said:
Legally, the emulators are legal, but downloading the ROMs aren't. You have to use the actual copy of the game or rip it yourself and not distribute online. Morally, though? I don't see anything wrong with it, especially for retro games, as they make as much money from sales of a used copy as they do from downloading an illegal copy.

Ironically... Nintendo possibly used an illegally downloaded Rom on it's Wii store.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us

I think it's legal though for them, because they're the copyright holders.



VGPolyglot said:
Pemalite said:

Which is exactly what I have stated. Just with more words.

Ironically... Nintendo possibly used an illegally downloaded Rom on it's Wii store.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-18-did-nintendo-download-a-mario-rom-and-sell-it-back-to-us

I think it's legal though for them, because they're the copyright holders.

Indeed. That would be the case.

But if they downloading it via a torrent... Then they would have uploaded data as well. Which means they have redistributed pirated software, which is where the grey area comes into it.




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