this brings to mind some very very old topics
"can emulator authors be sued?" can web sites be sued?
no one can be sued if they reverse-engineer something. Color Dreams and Tengen (Atari) reverse-engineered the NES back inthe Eighties and Nintendo tried to sue them for it - Nintendo lost. These companies did this to get around the "licensing lock-out" technology for the console and be able to produce unlicensed games for the system. nintendo tried to make a case that they were patent infringing, or something, if I remember correctly.. but no one was doing anything wrong, it's not illegal to reverse engineer something, only to steal the technology (which was not done). A grey area I guess. Anyway the same thing with emulator authors - no one is stealing any technology, it's reverse engineered, so they are not doing anything wrong. NOW - if they are using an illegally-dumped system BIOS, as some emulators do (not for GP32, as far as I know.. actually maybe a couple of 'em do, but not any of the more sue-able ones) - then you are looking at some trouble. System BIOS dumps count as illegally stolen technology - you ain't supposed to have it, it counts as "harmful to the wellbing of a company" in many cases, and has shown up before in the emulation scene. Davesclassics.com (now known as vg-network.com) got into big trouble for having a playstation BIOS hosted on their site (they didn't dump it - just put it up for download) They were a pretty high-profile emulation site, so the IDSA nailed 'em for it (and not too badly either, as obviously they are still up on the web!) Likewise, after the Mame Emulator for Xbox was first released, X-Mame or whatever it was called - DAYS after - Microsoft was all over that business (in the bad way) as the development of that emulator used Xbox BIOS to develop his emulator, and so web sites stopped posting the emulator for fear of reprieval (no matter how many times i type it, just can't get that word to look right... too lazy too look up in the dioctionary, but not too lazy to type up a whole damn couple sentances about it!)
so there's some information for you, about 'the rich history of emulation and legalities' -- pardon me if it's a little foggy, I haven't been super on-top of all that stuff, but you get the gist. All very interesting anyway. Someday people will be studying "Video Game Law...!" (or more likely, "internet Law" as there's so much stuff that is happening now that just hasn't had a precedent set, yet.. technology is moving too quickly for the slow lumbering legal system to keep up with, apparently.)
ps. -- you guys remember ultraHLE? the N64 emulator for PC, back when it first came out? "run super mario 64 and Zelda 64 on your PC!" Nintendo was all about suing THOSE emulator authors. I don't believe they had any legal right there wither, at least not going by anything I typed above (using a BIOS etc.) but I think they might have been going after some different way of suing them ("causing irreperable harm to their business practices, etc.." or something) -- does anybody remember exactly what was the case they made, there? Anyway, the two coders halted development of that emulator pretty damn quickly after the mass media got wind of it. It picked development up again, slowly and surely, but never to the same degree as it's initial release/promise and without the media storm that was originally surrounding it. Interesting stuff..
