Ody
New member
Actually, I may be wrong but not utterly. Let me explain since I studied law during my undergraduate studies.
There are two sorts of legal protection for software: copyright and patent.
Very likely, this emulator is copyrighted since Nintendo has the financial mean to pay for the protection. However, copyright does not protect against personal use. For example, most songs are copyrighted and you are still allowed to listen. Copyright protects against unauthorized commercial distribution and change in the protected object, which 99.99% of users don't even have a clue of.
On the other hand, there may be a patent protecting the emulator (which can also be likely since Nintendo has money). Two cases can be considered:
- the emulator is not patented, in this case, the use is totally legal and if there were to be legal pursuit, it would only concern the one that leaked.
- the emulator is patented, in this case, it implies that the emulator has to go public since it is one of the conditions for a patent to be accepted. And released in public means usable by all legally.
To illustrate, you can take the example of Coca-Cola. The formula has never been known outside the company because it was never patented. Coca-Cola decided not to buy a patent protection for its forumla because patent has a limited length in time and their formula, though protected would have been known by the general public and usable by all after the protection time expired. Rather they decided to keep it secret, if the formula was leaked, then Coca-Cola could only blame the one employee that was at fault, everyone else can use it without fear of legal issue.
So regardless of what we can read on the web, using this emulator is legal. The web has also spread other flase rumors like trying a rom for 24 hours is legal, etc...
Nevertheless, to moderate a little my analysis, let's say I may be a little wrong since software patent is a sensible subject. The development of this area is quite different between countries and there may be states that would forbid the use of such software.
However, regardless of what is said around the web, using emulator is already illegal, even if you don't run commercial rom. Emulators use part of a console specification and as such they should have obtained a license from the console company, which is unlikely the case since these companies are not very inclined to incite emulator development. If you add rom, which is the major use of emulator, all the emulation community is just plainly illegal in theory.
Anyway, all this to say that, we are all in illegality but we are still using emulators and roms, so there is no point in further discussing ensata, especially when it can runs less than 10 games in total.
Sorry for being so long
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