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i don't feel comfortable with you trying to devil's advocate shitty practices that only harms the community as a whole and i really don't feel comfortable having a valuless argument about it just to entertain you.


can i just say you have a big dick and i couldn't possibly compete with you in any meaningful way so that you'll feel secure in your position in the world and leave me alone for a change?

Copy protection makes things messy, though. Emulated games that can be played with good performance on modern hardware don't tend to be copy-protected in the first place -- the protection was usually a matter of the console verifying the media to be authentic, rather than protection on the software itself, so an emulated console that simply didn't check for authenticity wasn't really violating copy protection; the purpose was to prevent people from making copies and then playing them on the original hardware. We're going to see the first REAL sign of trouble with 3DS ROMs -- these are heavily copy-protected; the ROMs themselves are easy to rip, but an emulator can't play them because they're encrypted with a key that's well-hidden inside the console.

The RIAA makes the same claims -- that having pirated MP3s is itself a crime. It's not; distribution is. And they pursue people who are sharing files, not the downloaders (as if downloaders could even be meaningfully tracked when it comes to music). That doesn't make downloading music MORALLY right, and especially in light of laws protecting music that have been passed over the last few years, there are other technicalities you could be caught on (especially if the music was copy-protected).

oh my good gosh, you are right! wow, i did not know this and i am happy to see that simply owning is not the offense i have been told over and over it was. thankyou

US doctrine of first sale says you have a right to do whatever you want with something once you've purchased it. If you have a cartridge or a disc, you have a legally-protected right to make copies of it (despite the "not authorized to make backups" claim that Nintendo put in the instruction manuals -- this claim wasn't enforceable, it was just FUD)... but you DON'T have a legally-protected right to GIVE someone the copy. And emulation itself is just an implementation of publicly-available standards and hardware descriptions, unless there's a BIOS image necessary to emulate the system as a whole, and emulators TRY to reimplement the BIOS functions instead of emulating a pirated version because it tends to be faster and avoids legal troubles.

I don't have any specific links to offer you, but it's really not hard to do a quick google search for legal issues surrounding emulation.

Nintendo's claims weren't 100% legally enforceable. They KNEW that, but they still wanted to SCARE people into avoiding ROMs entirely. They PURSUED people who were offering ROMs for distribution, because that IS something that's illegal according to US copyright law, and they CHALLENGED companies producing flash carts (I believe primarily on patent grounds for the format of the cartridge, but also in some cases for the bootlegged cartridge header that made the console willing to load the data).

is that really so? nintendo's stance a few years ago was that roms were a direct infringement and a suable offense with jail-time and there have been issues with people getting in trouble for downloading gameboy roms(but not hacks). do you have where you got your information? i would like to see myself

I need a chance to get a few hours of solid work in for it. It's soon but I'm not going to give an estimate because it's all dependent on how many phone calls I get tomorrow and how long the interview takes.

how soon for the event? i assume since you are on right now playing in the counting thread it will be soon right?

ok~ i will go see