• Grangle1
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    3 months ago

    The previous times these types of issues have actually gone to court (Nintendo v. Tengen back in the '80s and Sony v. Bleem in the '90s) pretty much all ended in the same way: the emulator/bypass maker won the suit, but the copyright holder drowned them in so many legal costs they had to fold anyway. And these were larger companies with much more resources than any indie emulator dev can muster.

    EDIT: also, it should be noted that Tengen and Bleem were able to win their cases specifically because their chip/software were complete reverse engineers and did not contain any Nintendo/Sony proprietary code. It’s not to say that if an emulator like Yuzu that requires a cryptographic key from an actual console were to go to court that they wouldn’t still win as long as that key is not provided, but it does give the console maker more leverage, and without a lot of resources, indie emulator devs would likely not want to take the chance.