Emulation = Prison? NOT promoting piracy just wondering.

[Sung-Hwan]

I've never done it before, nor has it crossed my mind to until recently where I sort of thought about it to reach out to extremely rare (and pricey) games I'll never play without going through an insane hurdle. All my friends discourage me though, saying it'll get me in prison or worse...

Just making sure before I think of doing anything dangerous or stupid is all, since people here are experts.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Its usually the people who are behind the logistics side of piracy who get into trouble, like the creators of Pirate Bay. Though there are random examples out there of people arbitrarily picked on its one in a million. Theres safety in numbers and one pirate is a drop in the ocean. Thered literally not be enough prison cells to lock everyone up who does it.

 

[gsilver]

I'm not sure that anyone has ever gotten in trouble for downloading old games for obsolete systems.

Current games and current systems might get you a nastygram from the publisher sent to your ISP, who may route it to you, and it may threaten things like getting your internet shut down.
...But I don't recall a case of someone actually getting sued for downloading current games, either.

There's a whole lot more risk in actually publishing the stuff, though. Don't be stupid and do that.

 

[Fappy]

Admitting to piracy on this forum is against the CoC, guys. Best keep it to yourself unless you want to get wrathed.

(Not a dismissal of the OP, just letting y'all know what not to say)

 

[Fat Hippo]

How dangerous this kind of stuff is also depends on where you live. So for me, living in Switzerland, the authorities have more or less stated that chasing pirates is too much of a hassle, ineffective and a waste of resources, and hence they've decided to not give a shit. The result is that people in Switzerland can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want with impunity (for now).

Some countries also have gaps in their laws, so downloading may be legal, while uploading is illegal. Note that this means that torrents are still illegal, as you are both an up- and downloader!

So my advice would be to find out what exactly the actual laws in your country are, as well as studying whether people have been convicted in the past, and what happened to them. As people have stated, actually publishing something on a site is far, far riskier than merely downloading something.

And has been stated, The Escapist does NOT promote piracy or illegal activity of any kind. Tread with caution if you value your forum health!

 

[leberkaese]

Legal elements of emulating games:

- the emulator itself isn't illegal. You can download them everywhere
- buy the game on ebay, now you can put it into your DVD/CD-Rom drive!

Illegal element of emulators: Getting the console's BIOS. If you get caught downloading this you gonna have to pay a fine.

Nowadays you don't have to use emulators anymore. Simply buy a cheap PS3 or Wii or whatever. They have most of the old and important games on their stores.

 

[Sung-Hwan]

Legal elements of emulating games:

- the emulator itself isn't illegal. You can download them everywhere
- buy the game on ebay, now you can put it into your DVD/CD-Rom drive!

Illegal element of emulators: Getting the console's BIOS. If you get caught downloading this you gonna have to pay a fine.

Nowadays you don't have to use emulators anymore. Simply buy a cheap PS3 or Wii or whatever. They have most of the old and important games on their stores.

Ok. This pretty much seals the deal for not even thinking of trying this. To be honest I sometimes browsed 4chan and noticed people mention emulating with impunity and thought it'd be fine, but I'm certain now its not. Escapist is reliable for advice in this regard.

 

[Plucky]

I assume that they just go after the contributor of ROMs/ISOs rather than the clients. videogames just doesn't look as major as film releases where the worldwide market is much more restricted. some are just more vigilant about it than others like Warner Brothers or Sony. films are much more larger than Videogames so a lot more people would probably torrent it; however each person who downloads a torrent also adds seeds for other people to download said data, so it's not just 1 person pirating but also the piraters are sharing with the others.

So you probably won't see people getting arrested and made example of just for downloading something like Super Mario Bros. but you would see large extensive cases taken against people for sharing early airings of movies or non-sharable source codes. also stuff like "Piracy is legal if you own the game in real life" or "you won't get arrested if you delete it after downloading it for a day" wouldn't really be defensive, however copying stuff for personal use may be legal in some places, though there'd be conflicting stuff about bypassing console locks or reverse engineering consoles for PCs since there's probably something illegal in how the copiers were made.

Note, im not supporting piracy. but i support the online aspect, you could probably download demos from console markets or download freeware stuff like the Original Cave Story or Spelunky classic, seems to be the trend these days that solodevs releases a game, then gets picked up. same with Minecraft.

 

[Sung-Hwan]

I actually watched Jim Sterling's recent video on piracy and its standing with creators.

Pretty interesting.

 

[Riotguards]

its all grey area when dealing with emulators, hell i've used one at my college (not university) and they've had no fuss (as well as a few of my other friends who played emulators there)

 

[sneakypenguin]

Nobody gives a crap if you emulate. IDT there has been a single case of someone playing smash bros on their phone or whatever and getting fined/prison. I'll throw emulators on my phone or PC just cause playing a n64 or psp looks like ass on a TV nowdays.

If the big N doesnt want me to play ssb or goldeneye on my phone then they should release a legit version on the play store for 2 bucks.

 

[Prince of Ales]

Usually when I emulate I'm just reminiscing. I mean I'll just replay through stuff I haven't played for years and happened to think about one day. Like fuck have I still got my copy of Suikoden 2 still around (btw did anybody see what I did there?) and like fuck do I still have a working PSX.

So yeah, that's the sort of stuff I download. If you go downloading other stuff then it's not so much a legal grey area as a legal black area. But so much as I figured out downloading the legal stuff, nobody is actully ever going to call you out on it. I presume the industry just doesn't have a thirst for blocking that kind of thing, because it's very easy to obtain if you search for the right things.

 

[Windcaler]

Emulation itself is not illegal and does not violate copyright law. If you have the technical know how and equipment you can copy/remove a Rom from an old game and use an emulator to play it on something else. Thats all legal. However if you were to download the rom from say a torrent site that is violating copyright law.

Most people do the latter because they lack the knowledge and/or equipment to do the former and thats why many people think Emulation is illegal. They are mistaken.

As for consequences, as far as Im aware convictions just amount to basicly being fined anything from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand dollars

 

[gsilver]

Though I do have to pose one question:

How often would someone even *want* to play an emulator for a game that they don't already own.

99% of the time, newer games are better, so the only reason that I can see that people would want to use an emulator is if they want to revisit an old game that they already love (and consequently, own)

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Though I do have to pose one question:

How often would someone even *want* to play an emulator for a game that they don't already own.

99% of the time, newer games are better, so the only reason that I can see that people would want to use an emulator is if they want to revisit an old game that they already love (and consequently, own)

While I would hesitate to use the word "better" to describe newer games (and simply use "different"), this is honestly pretty spot-on for a reason to do so. Several of my favorite games are on consoles I simply don't have access to anymore. That and I don't have the game, but bought it when it originally came out and either lost it or traded it in (younger me lost a lot of stuff for no reason, and also thought ever trading in games wasn't a bad deal). Emulation provides a way to relive those experiences without the greater hassle of re-obtaining the console and finding the game.

Another reason is to simply play games you missed from that generation that are difficult to access otherwise. Like older titles with exorbitant prices on eBay or similar sites.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Though I do have to pose one question:

How often would someone even *want* to play an emulator for a game that they don't already own.

99% of the time, newer games are better, so the only reason that I can see that people would want to use an emulator is if they want to revisit an old game that they already love (and consequently, own)

Because... *pours coke into glass* Newer games are not necessarily better. You may as well ask why someone would want to watch movies from the 80's or buy Michael Jackson albums instead of One Direction albums.

Emulation allows people to play games they would not ordinarily be able to play or afford to play. A very good example of this is the N64. While N64 emulation has been obscenely broken for over a decade (but is improving), people turned to it in droves because they didn't feel like paying 50-200 bucks in order to play Conker's Bad Fur Day. Or spend significant amounts of money on the less expensive but still very expensive entries in the N64 library. You must remember that from a sales viewpoint, most people did not actually play iconic, cult classic N64 titles at the time. Not everyone has a massive box filled with N64 cartridges like I do.

Thanks to copyright and general nonsense, we are likely NEVER going to get legitimate releases of a huge chunk of the N64's library. But these are games people discover and want to play for themselves.

 

[gigastar]

I dont consider software emulation to be piracy so long as you own a copy of the software you wish to emulate.

I also dont consider it to be piracy when a game cannot be purchased anywhere. They cant lose money on something if theyre not selling it anyway.

If that happens to include the massive swathe of PS1, PS2, Xbox and N64 games that we are probably never going to see again, then by all means, go nuts.

 

[ThePreyApproaches]

As far as I'm concerned the creators of some emulators should be put in prison for not making it recognize my goddamn controller's goddamn trigger buttons!

 

[Ambient_Malice]

As far as I'm concerned the creators of some emulators should be put in prison for not making it recognize my goddamn controller's goddamn trigger buttons!

If they're analogue triggers, they're not actually buttons, but rather treated like an analogue stick, or sticks. Even if emulators do recognise them, sometimes pressing both will cancel them out.