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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."
I find it strange and somewhat stupid that Nintendo hasn't tapped into this market... they should be teaming up with the people making emulators, rather than trying to stop the community from doing what they love. It's not like they're going to get any money from the Nintendo/SNES/Etc. at this point anyway. I can understand their frustration with a GBA emulator, but the others... just think of the possibilities, Nintendo!! Surely Nintendo couldn't hurt itself by teaming up with the creators of ZSNES and releasing a commercial version (rather like Linux commercial releases) that includes a bunch of games and some extra features (PDF guides for the games, maybe some touch-ups to the emulator, etc.). Plus, people would get a warm fuzzy feeling for knowing that they'd be collaborating with both Nintendo and emulator creators.
These guys seem to have stepped into legal hot water in several places.
- Emulating a video game platform is okay, but the patent Nintendo is claiming is against a program emulates multiple handheld videogame consoles based on analysing its input file to declare what format it has been given and therefore which console it needs to emulate. Now, there's likely was that a multi-platform emulator can step around this limitation, like requiring the user to declare which emulation mode is to be used, but this is definitely something the write of such a program should have a lawyer look over before they release their product.
- Emulating a video game platform is okay, but if there are no legal non-cartrige games available for that platform, there's a problem. The Atari emulator community has managed to not just reverse engineer the platform, but have also reverse engineered development tools for that platform so there are some legal freeware Atari 2600 games in circulation. I don't think there are any freeware Game Boy Advance games in circulation yet.
- You can legally copy your cartriges to your computer (if you can) to make a backup copy that could later be used to restore a lost or damaged cartrige, but you can't legally do anything else with your backup copy and still hide behind the backup fair use shield.
- The moral justifiation that you can download from the internet what you legally have another copy of is not a legal one. Maybe it should be, but under today's laws it isn't so that's not a defense to hide behind.
In short, this seems like a tool that encurages piracy and cannot seem to come up with a "substation non-infringing functionality" yet. It should be held tight to the developer until somebody can come up with one... maybe a lawyer can help find one.
"Virtual LCD" means that the emulator emulates an LCD and all its interactions with the emulated CPU, specifically the Hblank and Vblank states and the current scanline number. But still, any Game Boy emulator first published on the Internet before November 28, 2000, is prior art that a reasonably-funded defendant could use to invalidate most or all of this patent.
Or we could just forget what's legal and simply do what's fair.
It was fair, though not legal, for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus.
It was fair, though not legal in many states, for gay people ot have intimate relationships.
It's fair, though possibly not legal, for me to play my legaly purchased games from any media I choose on any platform I choose.
When we start doing what is legal instead of what is fair then we lose our most basic right and one that's not even in the constitution; our right to do no more or less than we would have done to ourselves. When we do what's fair then we might lose in the short term, but everyone wins in the long run.
TW