Emulation
Conclusions

"Though it's clearly unlawful to sell or download pirated video games," writes Chris Taylor in Time Magazine, "it remains unclear whether the same strictures apply to emulator software, as Sony and Nintendo claim." Indeed, a binding legal decision on emulators has yet to be reached -- but we have already reached our own conclusion: we support the partial ban solution. It is the opinion of this project group that most software emulators are, as the industry claims, completely legal.

Software emulators may in some cases encourage and facilitate piracy, but our opinion is that this in itself is not sufficient to warrant their being banned. Our reasoning is simple: while emulators can be used illegally, they also have many legitimate uses. Mac users, for example, may depend on the occasional PC application now and then; Virtual PC provides a perfectly legitimate way for them to run PC applications on their computer. Just as guns may be used to commit murder but may also be used legitimately, just as bridges may be used to commit suicide but may also be used legitimately, so emulators may be used to run pirated software -- but may also be used legitimately. The fact that emulators can be used for piracy is not justification enough, in our opinion, for banning them.

We do concede that emulators should be banned under some circumstances. For example, all emulators that are distributed with a verbatim copy of a copyrighted ROM BIOS are illegal because they are in violation of international copyright laws. On the other hand, emulators that must have a copy of the BIOS to run but that require the users themselves to supply a legitimate copy of the BIOS, or emulators that reimplement the BIOS, are perfectly legal.

We also disagree with Connectix's statement that "how [an emulator is] built is not germane to the question." On the contrary, how an emulator is built is very relevant to the question. If technical knowledge of the system being emulated is obtained through publicly available sources (for example, most Commodore 64 emulator developers learn about that system by reading the publicly-available Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Manual), we feel that it is legal to write an emulator for that system. Likewise, it is legal to learn about a system by reverse engineering that system. However, we believe that it is illegal to write an emulator for a system if technical information for that system was obtained through illegal means, such as by intercepting the secret internal documents of the company manufacturing the system.

Of course, we believe that posting pirated software on the Internet so that those who have emulators for the appropriate platform can run the software is unequivocally illegal.

Finally, we believe that if an emulator developer is found guilty in court, the motive of the developer in implementing the emulator -- which, for individual developers, is often the technical challenge of writing such a program -- should be a mitigating factor in deciding the developer's punishment.

Our overall opinion is that software emulation technology holds considerable potential. We hope that all future court decisions or legislation concerning emulators will be able to simultaneously protect the legal rights of all parties involved as well as preserve the promise that emulation technology now holds.

NEXT: Related Links


MPEG Layer 3   |   Search Engines and Directories
Reverse Engineering   |   CD Burners

Introduction


Ted LeVan   |   Huat Chye Lim   |   Marissa Mayer   |   Ann Rose Van

Computer Science 201 Final Project
Stanford University, March 1999