Nintendo's interpretation is some real B.S. though. Basically, that copying devices are illegal, emulators are illegal, and so on.
> A ROM is a ROM is a ROM.
Legally, from my understanding, there's also metadata about the provenance of the data. Where did it come from? Did you read it from a memory chip yourself, or download it from the internet? The data could be identical, but is the data legal if it was acquired illegally?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
Copyright holders are not gods. The idea that their word is gospel is patently false. And in the specific case of Nintendo, they are even less reliable then most in terms of accurately communicating your rights to you. Nintendo have very little respect for copyright law as it actually exists, and instead try to assert whatever rights they wish they had and hope nobody fights them on it.
I don't have access to one of those licenses at the moment but if you happen to have one of them from one of the old NES games, I would be very interested in knowing if it has a section that states that the consumer has a right to backup the game onto another medium and play it there.
Again, you seem to be talking about copyright. I'm talking about the legal rights of the consumer when they purchased the license (game) from Nintendo. This is a good discussion, though.
The point is that the EULA does not give Nintendo absolute power just because you played the game. They can't, for example, stick "You owe 30 years of indentured servitude to Nintendo" in the back of the Zelda manual and expect to get a bunch of free work out of the deal.
Nintendo have a very aspirational view of how much control they get over people who buy their stuff, and the law may even bear them out in some cases, but you can't take their word as law just because they wrote a license.
The default right is ours, to be permitted to retell stories, replay musical works we've heard, and even reproduce works of art like video games.
We -- from whom the power to govern comes -- cede this freedom for the sake of promoting arts and sciences. But we do so in a limited fashion. See Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Our representatives scribbled in "but 'limited Times' means a century or two lol" underneath this and called it "Title 17".
As chc states, the copyright gives its holder the ability to grant us licenses. But we could make the case that the limited-monopoly we granted them to begin with has expired or is no longer valid. The copyright holder has concluded that it's not worth their time to continue to offer this work to anyone. So, who then, can curate this work of art that is now an element of our culture? In the mid twentieth-century, if the materials to produce the yellow, green, blue pigments featured in "The Scream" were licensed to painting copiers by Munch's estate, would we be obligated to source those pigments from them? What if his estate no longer sold them?
The point I'm trying to hit upon is that you're drawing a distinction between copyright and the consumer's legal rights. But the copyright is merely the instrument by which our freedoms are limited to those specific terms. If we reject the copyright claim, then the license's terms are moot.
Note: I'm not saying I like it! I'm just saying it is the way it is.
Copyright law in the US includes the concept of fair use, which includes rights that the owner doesn't get a say in.