Your last paragraph is pertinent question. But even if not an infringement, it is surely hypocrisy of the highest order.
All they're doing is cutting their losses, they haven't done anything that conflicts with their stance on emulators.
The thing is, if Nintendo needed the ROM for whatever reason because it was an archive, then Nintendo would be wrong in saying ROM is not archival.
Of course they never mention the word "emulator" when talking about their "virtual console" games or their GBA "ports" of NES games that simply emulated the original ROM.
(Also, copyright is generally civil, not criminal. Copying a copyright protected work shouldn't be described as "illegal" or a crime, but may make you civilly liable for damages.)
>> They always attempt to frame emulators as [...]
For many, many years Nintendo tried to pain emulators as only being used to infringe copyright. They are have been dissembling about emulation (and copyright) for >15 years. "Emulator" is a bad word to Nintendo, far more so than other video game companies.
This is why they called the network downloads on the Wii a "Virtual Console" (it's kind of like the original console, just "virtual"). They claim that the NES Classic "...is a miniaturized version of the groundbreaking NES, originally released in 1985."[1] which implies that they may have something resembling an actual 6502 when it's actually an Allwinner R16 SoC running Linux[2] and a software NES emulator.
[1] http://www.nintendo.com/nes-classic/
[2] http://hackaday.com/2016/11/13/linux-on-your-nes-classic-edi...
I never claimed otherwise.
> they're obviously not infringing upon their own copyright.
Obviously. Nobody is claiming otherwise.
> You're being overly pedantic.
Perhaps, if you're referring to the straw man you're creating.
I'm talking about their attitude and their attempt to frame "emulation" as "piracy". Just like the movie studios that try to frame bittorrent as only a pirate tool, Nintendo has consistently refused to even acknowledge the existence of non-piracy uses of emulation. Now, many years later, Nintendo is just barely starting to understand that emulators have more uses than what their own rhetoric has claiming.
I'm far more interested to learn if the Virtual Console itself uses any open-source code to power the emulator - and if it means there's a potential GPL or other copyleft license violation going on - because that would be deliciously ironic for their very strong anti-(unauthorized)-emulation stance - what better endorsement than to have your own open-source emulator repurposed by Nintendo themselves?