Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us?
by eridius on Friday January 20, 2017 @10:46PM
(#13448636)
You're being overly pedantic. Yes, Nintendo says emulators are used to copyright infringement, but it should be blindingly obvious that they mean third-party emulators. Nintendo owns the actual hardware AND the games in question, so there's nothing at all wrong with them doing their own emulation, because they're obviously not infringing upon their own copyright.
Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us?
by pdkl95 on Saturday January 21, 2017 @12:55AM
(#13449040)
> there's nothing at all wrong with them doing their own emulation
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.
Re:Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us?
by eridius on Saturday January 21, 2017 @11:39PM
(#13453607)
The conversation in the past has always been about third parties emulating hardware they don't own the copyright to, in order to play software they don't own the copyright to. Nintendo owns both the hardware and software, so even if they're using emulation technologies under the hood rather than actually porting the game to the new hardware, what difference does that make?
(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...