Emulation

[nobiggieBIG]

Is emulation illegal?

 

Can you emulate if you own the game?

[minibois]

Legal gray zone at best. Depends on where you're from too.

The emulators themselves are pretty 'legal', but whether or not you're allowed to have a copy of a game you own.. Questionable. Same with having a copy of a DVD/CD of yours on your webserver. Legality depends on where you are from.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The illegal part of emulation and such is using code that is copyrighted, including the software you run on it.

[OliverKunnington]

3 minutes ago, Abyssal Radon said:

Here is the states. If you own a hardcopy of a game. Then you use a emulator and download a ripped version of the game, technically your not doing anything wrong. It's pretty shady shit, but to my knowledge it's only illegal if you don't purchase the game and pirate it. But really, it's not a big deal. The emulation part is illegal because of the copyrighted material i.e. code to run the roms/iso's, but obviously it's damn near impossible to stop. I use the Dolphin Emulator all the time whenever friends come over, we connect 4 Xbox One controllers and play GC/Wii games. What a blast lol.

 

 

That is the weirdest loophole I've ever heard.


ps can you be prosecuted in the states for owning pirated material?

[Drak3]

Emulation is not illegal.

Creating/owning backups of software that you own physical copies to is not illegal.

Using said backups for emulation, provided you still own the software, is not illegal.

 

Downloading copies of softwares you do not own is illegal. But that's the only illegal aspect.

[Drak3]

Just now, Abyssal Radon said:

Wrong. Emulation is illegal, because of the copy righted material. Otherwise I would agree with your claims. 

No, it's not. Emulation of softwares that are legally acquired is 100% legal in copyright law, same with emulation software itself. The backup of legally acquired softwares is 100% legal in copyright law. It has actually been deemed illegal to prohibit consumers from creating legitimate backups of softwares, provided they maintain ownership of the source version and do not distribute the backed up copy.

 

The only point where Emulation can be deemed illegal,is the emulation of illegally acquired backups of software, AKA piracy. This pertains to ROMs and ISOs downloaded without ownership of a copy of the source material. This is only applicable to games and the actual BIOS of the system. The latter isn't required to emulate a system, just to mirror exact extended functionality (gameshark cheats).

[Seamonster420]

Emulators themselves are not illegal, this was established by the court decision Sony Computer Entertainment Inc v Connectix Corp where in it was found that copying a system BIOS for the purposes of creating an emulator was considered fair use. If they were then devices such as the Retron 5, which is a software emulation box, could not exist. However, downloading ROMs is most definitely illegal that's why ROM sites are constantly getting taken down. If you were to say download a PS1 emulator and you happened to own a physical PS1 game, you can legally pop the disc into your computer and play it on the emulator.