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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Emulation doesn’t just apply to games. The entire legality is based off of the fact that reverse engineering is also legal, which is how companies can replicate ideas or concepts from competitor products, or how 3rd party vendors make products compatible with other platforms.

    It would be stupid to have to wait for a patent to expire before you can utilize the concept in your own product. Patent cockfighting would be a completly new level of hell, and no one would get anywhere.

    Imagine having to wait 10 years before you can use 3rd party controllers for your switch because Nintendo uses a proprietary bluetooth driver. 3rd party Wiimotes wouldn’t even exist.

    The only ethical conundrum is the aide in piracy, but we’ve already seen how little that has to do with emulation due to homebrew and flashcarts.

    If anything, Nintendo has a higher moral ground on ROM libraries which they can argue aides in piracy due to “bypassing” copyright protection.


  • Nintendo succeeded in killing Yuzu because they had decryption keys which Nintendo could argue is breaking their copy protection, which is why they settled for 2.4 million dollars in sales damages because they knew they wouldn’t be able to win in court.

    All of these forks have since removed the key and require the user to supply it (legally from your own console).

    So in theory they should be protected under US law since emulation and reverse engineering is completely legal.

    However

    Nintendo also has infinite money to throw at the problem, and FOSS devs are usually not willing to deal with insane amount of personal liability because of a hobby, which is how they killed Ryujinx.

    So you better hold onto your guts if you plan to fight Nintendo.

    Or move to i2p so they can’t disable you lol.