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Previously paid Nintendo DS emulator app on Android goes free (DraStic DS)
(www.androidheadlines.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Someone got scared it seems.
It's silly, all the legal precedence we have for emulators were for commercial offerings. If Nintendo wants to hit you with so many invalid lawsuits that you're forced to fold then this certainly won't stop them.
It's just bullying and it's going to keep happening until there's laws in place protecting it.
Some of the best inventions in history came from people reverse engineering the work of others. If we want to keep moving forward then we can't let companies bully people out of innovating. It's shooting ourselves in the foot.
The thing is that we don't know if the lawsuits are invalid.
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.