The whole thing seems silly as I don't see it's costing them money. But it's their product they can do what they want.
Same for Nintendo: Newer games might be nicer to look at, but old games are just as much fun. So working older copies of their games do cost them money, and they'd rather see them disappear.
It's just because of IP-law that they get to do this. If there were no IP-laws, it would be:
"I bought their product, now it's mine, and I get tot do what I want."
This is just overstretching of IP-laws if you ask me. This madness has to stop.
IP laws aren't a natural concept that exists by itself in nature, they're a construct manufactured and enforced by the governments. So if governments made them, then governments can easily rewrite them if they wish so.
But for that there needs public support and presure form voters to the politicians, but IP laws aren't something the average person cares or even ever thinks about, not when their core worries are inflation, CoL, housing, healthcare, education, etc, so the issue of IP laws is played exclusively on the battlefield of corporations and who has the most money for lobbying.
And corporations don't want laxer IP laws since that gives smaller players more leverage, versus the current status quo the favors the large plyers with the biggest litigation warchests to create large moats for them.
The NES was discontinued in 95, that was nearly 3 decades ago. I don't think they should have the right to prevent hackers to emulate it and share their findings.
Current consoles, yeah maybe, but even then the question would be why they should get a monopoly on the games developed for their platform..
They do not. Emulation is legal. However it is worth considering that:
0) NES Classic was sold as recently as 2018
1) Nintendo currently rent out NES games as part of Switch online
2) Copyright law ("lifetime" + 70 years) is on Nintendo's side for games themselves
3) Fair use can be a defense against infringement in some cases
4) Although it might or might not be fair use, I feel no guilt downloading Super Mario Bros 3 for an emulator since I've purchased it at least ten times by now, own multiple copies of the game on physical media, and am currently renting it through Switch online.
On the Sony/PlayStation side, I own a PS Classic, which actually runs a version of an open source PS1 emulator PCSX, amusingly enough. (I'm a bit disappointed that it's not a descendant of Connectix's emulator though.[1])
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....
To the extent that we let them. There's no natural rights going on here, so theoretically (if you believe in democracy) we still get to decide how much power foreign companies have.
And the US currently has an extremely long copyright period, life of the author + 70 years. Some (Larry Lessig and others) have argued that this violates the constitution's establishment clause for copyright, but so far the supreme court disagrees, and copyright reform also seems dead in the legislative branch. (And on the executive side, the copyright office is not sympathetic, and international treaties also impede copyright reform.)
But your thought experiment is interesting - suppose the US decides that Nintendo's copyrights no longer hold, and suppose that Japan decides that Microsoft's copyrights no longer hold? If it were only for old games and obsolete software, perhaps little would change. If it were for recent games/software, then I think it might change the incentives to localize games/software for other markets.
That would cause foreign countries to also ignore copyright held by US companies. Copyright laws only work as well as they do because all countries that matter sort of play by the same rules.
Remember that Apple had to be forced to even think about allowing emulators on their platforms by the EU and even then they aggressively block Americans from being able to access them.
Right but laws are only as good as their capability to enforce.
If I were to start an emulation project today I would mask my identity and try to do a better job of it than the silk road guy.
It's a shame ryujinx and yuzu were functionality killed when Nintendo got to the founding developers. There's contributions from other devs but I guess like with a lot of FOSS there's often just one person upon which the entire stack survives. Maybe the biggest projects like Linux and python can survive without their BDL's, but these emulators certainly haven't been able to, and that makes me sad.
I would love to take up the mantle of one of these but I don't know the first thing about emulation programming.
Ryujinx (Nintendo Switch emulator) has been removed from GitHub
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It appears that my suspicions are true, and that I am being specifically targeted by Nintendo. My recent Wii U video was taken down and I received a second copyright strike, even though this showcase video was no different than all of the tech demos and reviews I have made on this channel previously. I am still considering a counter claim under fair use, as the video was for educational use, transformative in nature, and had no effect on the market -- it was a demonstration of a console no longer for sale (even the Wii U eShop is closed, so the company itself has no means of earning revenue from Wii U sales). However, I am reluctant to open that can of worms with a multi-billion dollar corporation, as their next step would be to file legal action.
At the very least this means I am going to change how I approach future videos. I will no longer show any Nintendo games on-screen, which is a shame because I love using those games for my hardware demonstrations. I don't know how that will play out when it comes to showing things like ESDE frontend themes that contain Nintendo characters, but for now I am going to focus on actual gameplay. I am also going through the videos I am working on and blurring out any Nintendo game content as a precaution, even innocuous content like NES games. Unfortunately this is going to delay some video releases -- my latest video should be up right now, but instead I have to re-edit and re-upload the video first.
I know this is disappointing news, but with now two strikes on my channel, I don't really have any other choice except to adjust accordingly. Thanks for your understanding.
Nintendo's de facto method to do this is to simply re-release them on Switch - though this only matters for first-party titles.
I don't know what the fuck "safereddit.com" is, but it is an unnecessary layer of obfuscation when the literal source is right there.
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib
Agree that we don’t need to add a layer of obfuscation but this seems to be a way to reduce telemetry captured by Reddit.
Wow, the best way to get to know a game before buying is now illegal.
Which basically proves Nintendo has little to no moat apart from laws preventing their executables from being run elsewhere.
"They have little to no moat apart from copyright law protecting their IPs"
There, I rephrased it for you. It is actually one hell of a moat.
They waged war against Famiclones in the past - see NTDEC (which had trademarks involved, since NTDEC stands for "Nintendo Electronic Company") and Power Player Super Joy III cases. However, they did lose the PocketFami case (in Japan, mind you) due to patents expiring and the fact it does not come with built-in games.
Let's be real. I'm guessing only 1% will rip the ROM off their purchased cartridge and play on an emulator. The 99% will pirate games they never purchased.
The point is a good one though: can we preserve the games so that they'll be playable hundreds of years (or more?!) from now, much as we can still play tabletop games from antiquity (backgammon, 9 man morris, chess, mancala, go, senet, etc.?) Whether the cyborgs of the 25th century will still want to play Mario Kart is unknown however.
Are people really going to stop subscribing to Switch Online because NES ROMs are readily available for emulators?
What I think might (?) have some impact on Nintendo is downloading Switch games for execution on competing handhelds like the Steam Deck.
