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legality of emulators?
I've read a few articles about the legality and enforcement of illegally using emulators and roms (such as if you don't own the original copy of the game) and it seems its only video game companies that are pursuing and they only pursue the website distributing the roms/emulators. Now I've been playing emulators online and they always tell me if I do not own the game, legally I cannot play it. I can't seem to find anything about that online in terms of law enforcement cracking down on that. I guess what I'm trying to say is, do the feds or the cops actually track people down for this?
i never really heard of feds tracking down this stuff either let alone movies and music. but i enjoy playing a lot of NES and gameboy games but i cant buy them anywhere, so i turn to the internet alot. but one of my friends recently got a letter from the feds for downloading too many movies so i was a little concerned
3 Answers
- MagicianTrentLv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
Functionally, games are not really different from music or movies in this respect. However, there really has not been a large push from the gaming industry to go after individuals who download (possibly because the ESA isn't nearly as strong as the RIAA or MPAA), so normally it is the individual publishers going after sites that provide the ROMs.
Also, there are a lot of old games that were made by companies that no longer exist and were not bought by anyone else when the company went bankrupt. So sometimes the only "people" who would have a legal reason to care are a company that has no employees. With music and movies, there's pretty much always someone willing to buy the rights, but not so with games that were not big-name franchises.
- 1 decade ago
I've never heard of the feds tracking anyone over emulators. MP3s, on the other hand, yes. I guess the RIAA has more clout than Nintendo of America.
- ?Lv 44 years ago
this is not technically criminal. it fairly is technically unlawful. yet no person fairly cares. no longer even the unique builders (except the interest replaced into re-released on a later console). Emulators for previous consoles and discontinued video games are a quite risk-free and ideal product to apply, even nevertheless they are not criminal techniques of procuring video games, in the strictest experience. To do your area, evaluate helping the interest companies by way of procuring new video games once you could as a replace of procuring for used or renting.
