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Comment by mrkramer | Hacker News Reader

>You can charge for an emulator as a service for building and packaging it on the App Store (assuming you have permission somehow) or as long as you can definitively prove that you built it via some "clean room design" - that will protect you from legal issues should anyone decide to litigate you for stealing copyrighted code.

Yea, I get it....emulating is essentially mimicking but if you mimic whole bunch of specific features, APIs or whatever, it is still tricky legally. Because if you mimic the whole thing, then you somewhat copied the complete architectural design of hardware/software system that you are emulating.

For example I hear often about Nintendo emulators but if emulator devs decide to sell emulators, couldn't Nintendo sue emulator devs because Nintendo emulators are creating parallel market for Nintendo devices and therefore leaving Nintendo completely out of picture.

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No. See Sony v. Connectix or Google v. Oracle if you want to know more, but basically, it is fair use to copy interface features such as APIs for the purpose of interoperability or developer convenience.

Nintendo's counterargument to those cases has to do with DMCA 1201, an extremely broadly drafted law that has to do with copy protection. A lot of console emulators have to implement decryption functions in the emulator because people are bringing in ROM images or ISO dumps that are encrypted. Console emulation has a habit of just grabbing whatever format the piracy scene is using and going from there, which is a bad idea and what enables Nintendo to, say, sue the shit out of Yuzu.

At the same time, however, this isn't a critical flaw that makes all emulation illegal. Yuzu was also extremely sketchy in ways that let Nintendo connect the dots and say "this is infringement". There are plenty of emulators out there written by people who have good copyright hygiene that don't have this problem. e.g. WINE, Ruffle, PCem, DOSBox, etc. And none of this has to do with whether or not the emulator is being sold for money, is licensed as a Free Software project, developed by a community, etc.

This is a common misunderstanding of Google v Oracle.

In reality, the Appeals Court ruled APIs are copyrightable and the Supreme Court declined to make a ruling on that aspect.

This is also my understanding of the case. I'm not sure what I misunderstood? The ruling says it's fair use, whether or not the subject matter of the fair use is copyrightable.

The Supreme Court ruled the specific case of Google using Java APIs was fair use, but not any broad rules like "purpose of interoperability or developer convenience" are always fair use.

Right, it's legally OK to backward engineer something. There is no copyright or legal protections on the 'how'.

> but if you mimic whole bunch of specific features, APIs or whatever, it is still tricky legally.

If you mimic an API, as long as you can prove you didn't copy any of the original code or engineering - you are in the clear.

> because Nintendo emulators are creating parallel market for Nintendo devices

No, they are not. The parallel market only pertains to games (or specifically, the creative work that covers the IP for the game).

It’s about the line between what gets protected by patents and what gets protected by copyright. The rule is basically patents protect function, copyright doesn’t.

If the specific design of a windshield wiper blade was protected by copyright then its patent would be pointless. Therefore patents essentially invalidate copyright where they apply. People often hate software patents, but a 20 year window expires on anything built before 2004.

Copyright is about implementations, not architectural designs. That would be the domain of patents, and these have much stronger limits than copyright.

Most notably, you need to actively apply for them, and they expire much sooner than copyright. Besides that, software is not patentable in all jurisdictions.

Look into Bleem. It was sued, but it won. Though the legal costs did hurt the company， it reaffirmed that emulators are legal and you can sell them. In fact, there currently are nintendo emulators for sale to this day (3dSen)

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