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Nintendo Patents Handheld Emulation, Cracks Down
mclove writes "Looks like Nintendo has recently been granted a patent that gives them new leverage in their fight against emulators: Patent 6,672,963 mainly appears to cover emulators like UltraHLE that are custom-tailored for particular games, but they're already using it to suppress a new Game Boy Advance emulator for the Tapwave Zodiac, Firestorm gbaZ, and there's no reason to think they won't start leveraging it against anyone else trying to emulate their systems." The reprinted lawyer's letter from Nintendo also notes: "Whether you have an authentic game or not, it is illegal to copy a Nintendo game from a cartridge or to download and play a Nintendo ROM from the Internet."
That's not what the patent claims. The patent is for a handheld emulator that can dynamically chose which platform to emulate based on the input file it was asked to load.
The workaround is to forget about coding that part and just have the user select which platform needs to be emulated.
I don't think there are any freeware Game Boy Advance games in circulation yet.
Think again.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
By a locking chip, which prevented duplicates from being used in the system. However, they didn't have anything to prevent copying at the time. Also, hardware encryption is very easy. They could have done DES (or even AES if it had been invented by then) in hardware with almost no cost.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
As previously reported here on slashdot, there were a few exemptions granted for the DMCA, one of which was to allow backing up of cartridge based games/software.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Imagine for a second that I started up a company that made Gameboys, compatible 100% with the Nintendo Gameboy.
Something similar was already done in the 80s - several manufacturers made systems or add-ons for their own that were 100% compatible with the Atari 2600.
Atari took at least one of them to court, but it was ruled to be legal.
It wouldn't make much sense to do this now anyway, because there is no profit made on the systems - just the games, which Nintendo still collects the license fees for.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Yes, but "fair use" is not limited by backup copies only. The parent poster used the "and" in the sentence, and IMO, correctly so. I can make 2 or 3 copies of the game, but which one I use to play is irrelevant because, I imagine, such copying should fall under fair use.
IANAL, so depending on the law that applies to making digital copies of software, you can even loan them to your friend or brother or whoever. As long as you don't engage in wider/larger scale and/or for-profit distribution, it may well fall under fair use.
Remember that most commercial software comes with an EULA which they contend is a legal agreement between you and distributor/licensor. The EULA may limit your rights further; however, whether these agreements are valid or not is irrelevant in this case. First, Nintendo games don't come with anything that can even remotely resemble an enforceable agreement. Second, I don't think anyone, including Nintendo, will contend or in any way require, that a minor playing a GBA game should legally enter into an EULA-type agreement. Therefore, IMO, regular copyright restrictions with all "fair-use" rights intact should apply to their products.
The Capcom games you are thinking about are CPS2 games and they were protected by an encrpytion that was very hard to crack. It still hasn't been cracked. They just use custom written programs to dump the data as its decrypted.
Wrong.
Fair Use allows you _one_ copy
Show me where in copyright law it says that.
Note that clause 2 of paragraph 117 refers to the archival copies in the plural sense.
I have done a great deal of research on the topic of Fair Use
It doesn't really sound like it.