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

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.

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