The Mona Lisa survived hundreds of years.

1. I'm not familiar enough with your history to be able to answer to this properly. If you can provide be me a short elaboration, I'll gladly look into it however. Anyway, if a judge's judgement on a matter isn't the official interpretation of the law and thus effectively the law, I don't know what is. Whether that's the correct interpretation of the law might be questionable of course. Maybe you should have a system for fixing judges' errors, but I'd say that's an entirely different issue. Getting back to the actual emulator topic though: Which copyrighted property do you think emulators are violating?

2. I'm not stupid. I know very well something being illegal has nothing to do with its existence. Laws need enforcement to be effective. Anyway, your arguments 1 and 2 are seemingly separate and seemingly counter-arguments to two different arguments, while I only had one argument. Thus, it seemed odd that you seemed to be countering two different arguments when I only had one.

What a stupid comparison to the lifespan of electronic devices and the storage of digital media.

There are five different Mom'n Pop game shops in my city. They sell everything from Atari to PS4. There are shops like this all across the world.If hardware failed as quickly as you thought they would all be out of bussiness by now. Yes in 60 year's time there will be very few working systems, but not absolutely no working systems. The Mona Lisa survived hundreds of years. Original game carts and disks should be just fine. Not to mention the code for most games hasn't been lost. You won't need an emulator to grab the original code off the net, and 3D print a PS1 in 2074. Hell, by then I'm sure you would be able to just insert a disk or cart into a device and extract all the code from there no problem. 

It shows you're clearly above using anecdotal evidence to support your opinion.

I suspect you haven't really seen much of the world to think Ataris are being sold in local shops lol.

Game consoles die, cartridges die, even optical media dies. The TVs that can even support the old RGB format die as well. All of these have a specific lifespan no matter how much you try to deny it, it's just reality. The only way to conserve the games history and make sure it survives whatever may happen in the future, is in digital form. And the only way to have those games be playable will be with emulation, period. 

Also, unlike paintings, where they are unique and you are meant to just look at them, games are meant to be played and can be easily distributed online.

For the last time, emulation is used by the hardware manufacturers in order to keep those legacy games playable. Even they realised they should simply embrace it and profit from it, rather than fighting it and trying to ban it outright.

Paintings have to be kept at a certain humidity level or they begin to rot. This is comparing 500 years of art preservation to 60-70 years of disc/cart preservation. It's more than fair. 

The Mona Lisa survived... but it had some changes over the years: parts of it got overpainted in restauration, the varnish got darker and the picture has experienced some warping and swelling. This doesn't matter much for a painting, since minor changes in details don't change the overall impression of the portrait. For a computer program that wouldn't be good enough, if 0.1 percent of the code (or even less) get corrupted, the whole game can stop to work.

And thousands pieces of other artwork or literature weren't that lucky as the Mona Lisa and got destroyed or lost over the years:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_artworks
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work

The same will happen to big parts of software and movies over the decades, without emulation and digital preservation sooner than later.

1. It isn't anecdotal evidence because it's happening all across the world. 

2. Like I said before, in 2074 you will be able to 3D print your own PS1. No emulation required. 

The Mona Lisa survived... but it had some changes over the years: parts of it got overpainted in restauration, the varnish got darker and the picture has experienced some warping and swelling. This doesn't matter much for a painting, since minor changes in details don't change the overall impression of the portrait. For a computer program that wouldn't be good enough, if 0.1 percent of the code (or even less) get corrupted, the whole game can stop to work.

And thousands pieces of other artwork or literature weren't that lucky as the Mona Lisa and got destroyed or lost over the years:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_artworks
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work

The same will happen to big parts of software and movies over the decades, without emulation and digital preservation sooner than later.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find that 0.1 percent of the code and figure out what is missing though. Textual scholars have been able to reconstruct entire ancient documents by comparing copies. I agree that digital preservation will eventually be needed. Eventually all discs will fail, whether it is 70 years from now or 100 years from now. Eventually those discs will need to be ripped and their code will need to be preserved. But are emulators absolutely nesseccary for that? No.