On The Legality Of Emulators?

identity0 asks: "I was looking at old Slashdot stories, and there seems to be a few stories about various console emulators being sued for copyright and/or patent infringement. Now I have a question: is there a legal difference between "hardware emulators" like the console emulators, and "software emulators" like WINE? And what are the legalities of both kinds of emulators? The WINE FAQ says it's not an emulator because 'Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips.' - but since Windows also only runs on Intel boxes, I think I can call it an emulator."

Comments

Not an emulator

[molda]

Since wine actually requires you to have a copy of windows installed on your machine, it cannot by definition be an emulator.

Re:Not an emulator

[Lord Kano]

Since wine actually requires you to have a copy of windows installed on your machine, it cannot by definition be an emulator.

Point 1. Although wine CAN use native windows dlls, it doesn't require them.

Point 2. Connectix's Virtual PC (usually) comes with a copy of windows and I don't believe that there is any doubt that it IS an emulator.

Point 3. How do you define emulator?

LK

so far, so good.

[bluGill]

While the legality of emulators has been questioned several times, I'm not aware of any court decisions against emulators in general.

For the play station emulator the court said there was no imfringement even though code from the playstation was used in devoplment, because that code was not shiped to customers, and they needed to use it to reverse engineer the product. This is a major victory, but who much presidence it will set needs to be seen.

Warning, attempts to pass new comsumor laws may change this. Put the Your Rights Online seciont of /. on the main page for you view and read the stories! The write your congressmen often.

WINE is not an emulator

[The Madpostal Worker]

its an alternative implemenation of the Windows API. Just like cygwin is not an emulator, its a unix compatibility library. I suppose there is a fine line between the two, i think the term emulator should reserved for a more complete, lower lever system (for example snes9x is an emulator, it does *everything* that a nintendo does, from bootloader to hardware). Wine is just a replacement for some dynamic libraries distributed by microsoft.

/*
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/

Legal Precedent?

[Mathonwy]

Actually, I think Connectix won the injunction that Sony brought against them. I'm pretty sure Bleem won theirs. (Bleem & Connectix Virtual Game Station are two fairly developed Playstation Emulators.) So far Sony has been the most agressive company about going after emulators. With the loss of those two lawsuits, it looks like emulation may have some precedent.

IANAL, but I think that it came down to "Well, the playstation is a black box. We don't know what happens inside, just that these patterns of input equal these outputs. Our program responds the same way as the playstation, but the insides are probably very different."

I much prefer SEGA's method of dealing with emulators: hire the guy who was good enough to write them. (As far as I know, Steve Snake, author of KGen, [probably one of the 2-3 best sega genesis emulators in existance] is currently working for sega to produce all those "Sega PC" titles you see on discount racks for $10. (Sonic & Knuckles, etc) They're actually mini-emulators, with the rom image!)

Legal.

[legoboy]

I have a rather simple view on it - How many of these companies have actually filed lawsuits against the authors of emulation software? Not threatened, but filed. Sony attempted it against Bleem but failed. Nobody else has even tried. Distributing roms is a different matter - quite illegal as it is piracy, but no companies really enforce it.

I look at slander/libel in a similar vein. If you say something outrageous about someone/something on a strong enough platform and they don't file suit, it is quite likely to be true.
Re: A researcher who says low-sugar alternatives (inc. specific products) are worse for diabetics than sugar itself thanks to some substance that is in them.

------