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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

I just want to echo what a few people have mentioned here:

The legality of emulation was strongly upheld under pre-DMCA copyright law in U.S. court decisions where console makers lost against emulator developers.

However, the DMCA gave plaintiffs a whole new set of tools to prevent interoperability. Lots of interoperability and emulation cases have been lost under the DMCA. The DMCA radically limited the prior legal norm that you could create a compatible implementation of a proprietary technology from scratch.

If you agree that there should be a right to reimplement a third-party version of a proprietary system/technology/format/protocol (including one that uses some kind of secrecy to attempt to enforce DRM), you should oppose DMCA §1201.

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> The legality of emulation was strongly upheld under pre-DMCA copyright law in U.S. court decisions where console makers lost against emulator developers.

SCEA v. Bleem was filed in 1999, and the DMCA came into effect in 1998.

Ah, but the DMCA Section 1201 took effect in 2000-2001. Many other DMCA sections were delayed to take effect in the years following the law's passing.

Careful, §1201(a)(1) (to which the exemption rulemaking process applies) was delayed, but §1201(a)(2) and §1201(b) (which don't have the exemption rulemaking attached) were not delayed this way. (a)(1) is an "acts" provision while (a)(2) and (b) are "tools" provisions.

But the DMCA's 1201 provisions didn't apply to Sony v. Bleem since the DRM scheme of the PlayStation didn't attempt to stop you from copying, but instead focused on stopping a legitimate PS1 from playing copies.

I don't think SCEA started the lawsuit because they were sure they would win, I think the intent was to make Bleem run out of money.

    "Bleem!, financially unable to defend itself, was forced to go out of business."

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleem%21

Thanks for the correction. See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39599019

for a more detailed reply.

The same as in John Deere's case. You can fix your tractor but you will break the software patents

Reminder that the EFF is challenging section 1201 as unconstitutional: https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

Is there any updates on this case?

A couple of weeks ago the EFF filed a reply brief: https://www.eff.org/document/appellants-reply-brief-3

Can you give examples of some of those lost cases? Specifically emulation related ones?

I mistakenly thought that one of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin....

involved a literal emulator. However, none involved an emulator as we would understand the concept (as opposed to "interoperability" more generally). There was also the matter of the PC clones, where IBM's only litigation was against those who literally copied the BIOS, as opposed to those who made compatible hardware without IBM's permission

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible

although conceivably IBM was concerned about antitrust issues there in choosing not to litigate over the non-BIOS-copying clones.

As other commenters pointed out, there are court decisions in favor of emulators in the post-DMCA environment (Connectix and Bleem), where DMCA claims were not raised at all in those specific cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulator#Legal_issues

These two cases applied pre-DMCA copyright law to the question of the legality of the emulation, but weren't actually pre-DMCA chronologically. I'll take that as a very helpful correction to the way I phrased the point.

I oppose ALL of DMCA.

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