You're saying that it spells the end of consumers' rights, and I'm saying that it's happening either way. Maybe, it's the companies themselves that end consumers' rights through their own decisions and practices.

Right, but that's not the arguement people are making. They are saying that emulation is absolutely nesseccary for games preservation. But clearly it's not. 

Yep. But we can vote with our wallets. MS was forced to change their DRM policy once they saw the consumer reaction. 

"by voting with our wallets" you mean by...not buying it? If so, it sounds like piracy is actually the way to go, that way we can show them that putting in DRM is not going to stop piracy anyway, so they'll just give in and relent, and we get consumers' rights back!

They're not distributing it though. The user must provide it. Technically emulators aren't even dependent on actual firmware code; anything that provides similar functionality will most likely do. Thus the whole situation reduces to whether copyright (or rather, fair use, it seems) applies to APIs, to which the answer is no (see Oracle vs. Google). As far as my sense of justice is concerned, that is exactly the right decision. I don't know if there's any exceptions to this, but at least PCSX2 and RPCS3 work that way, and I would imagine others do too to avoid problems with copyright laws.

lol no I mean by choosing to buy another company's products. CEO's aren't bright enough to see it that way anyway. 

Right! I bet its the same people whowants Nintendo to go third party. 

Yeah that ruling got changed by a higher court. https://www.cnet.com/news/court-sides-with-oracle-over-android-in-java-patent-appeal/

Who in their right mind would want that?

The argument is for preserving software, not hardware. Obscure DOS and Atari games are prone to be lost due to lack of records not unlike early movies, without digital preservation virtually all of those game would have been lost.