Thread: Bring back nintendo emulators !!!
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bocaJ is offline bocaJ
2009-12-22 , 12:45
Posts: 224 | Thanked: 107 times | Joined on Aug 2009
#141
Originally Posted by Laughing Man View Post
Emulators are not illegal. Playing ROMs with them emulators however are. That's the issue at hand. Nintendo saw a Nokia employee in an official Nokia sponsored Youtube video playing a Nintendo game on the emulator.

Had the Nokia employee been playing some homebrew on the emulator then Nintendo would have no grounds (though they like to say that they do but in law they do not).
Isn't there some room for fair use here? I rip CDs and listen to them on my iPod N900. I don't really see a difference between space shifting a CD and space shifting a game. Now, if the media were in some way encrypted, that would be a different story under the DMCA, but as far as I'm aware, SNES cartridges had no such protection.

If I'm missing some case law on this (whether in the US, Finland, or Japan) I sincerely hope you'll let me know, but from what I've read, there's actually very little to support either side - the fair use status of space shifting is still a rather novel area of law. In turn, that's what kind of frustrates me about Nokia's decision here: rather than use their resources to help establish some good case law, they're backing away from the fight.