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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know why you are being downvoted. Of course emulators are being used to play pirated games.

Yeah. It's a bummer because I actually own the games and just want to play them at 4k60 rather than on the weak HW of the Switch. But I understand why Nintendo would target emulators of a _current gen console_.

To say that this is solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game is... being willfully ignorant because you don't want to accept that a large percentage of installs are doing so for piracy.

Of course it's not solely an attack on law abiding folks who own the game. But is is an attack on them nonetheless. Its also an attack on open source, software freedom, and digital preservation. Further, assuming there were legal threats involved, its an abuse of the legal system to harass open source developers working on perfectly legal software. Emulators are also direct competition to Nintendo's hardware, so you could see this as an anti-competitive move as well. There are lots of problems with this, and they're only mostly Nintendo's fault.

It's also important to remember that emulators exist without ROMs.

All the code that's in an emulator isn't infringing on any Nintendo's IP -- it's re-implementing Nintendo's hardware interface.

That it can be used to make piracy easier is unfortunately, but isn't really the emulator developers' concern, given...

There are substantial, legal, non-infringing uses.

In most legal jurisdictions, thankfully you can't ban something useful just because it might be used to commit a crime.

But what if it is mainly used to commit a crime?

playing video games is a CRIME against hard working RIGHTS HOLDERS

This is the same as saying that most of the money can only be earned by Fortnite. Surely you see that the status quo has given you much worse, not better, games?

You mean pirating video games is a crime against hard working video game developers.

I feel like the blame mostly lies on people who pirate games. It's a sort of tragedy of the commons. We could have a better world (Nintendo not caring if we play switch games we bought at 4k60 on a PC) but people who pirate games mucked it up.

Downloading files is mostly used for piracy. At some point, 70% of all internet was used for torrents and nothing else. Are you trying to tell me the internet should have been shut down?

Analogous question: At what percentage of uses for crime should guns be banned?

false equivalence, guns kill people, piracy doesn’t

Analogous question: At what percentage of uses for crime should train ticket copy machines be banned?

i’m okay with them not being banned? i don’t really give a shit if municipalities and train companies lose money

You would give "a shit" if you relied on the train and the company closed down. Certainly the people that do, do.

i don’t, i use my car. no need for a train. until we have high speed rail on the level of japan across the continental US, i have no interest in seeing trains succeed

There is this thing called "ethics"...

The problem is that this breaks down very fast. You would eventually care, when those people can no longer operate and then you're affected, i.e. this is a problem of selfishness.

People pirating Nintendo games AND people playing Nintendo games DO care - when Nintendo no longer makes money and there's no more games to play. And I know they care, because they're playing and love the games right now. So it is their problem, regardless of what they say. Their very actions prove it's their problem.

It's not unusual for law-abiding folks to be collateral damage for criminal activity.

One example I saw recently on here: locking up stuff in supermarkets. It sucks for real consumers because now they have to go out of their way to buy a razor. But it's intended to discourage theft.

The difference is that that is even worse, IMO, since the vast majority of people affected are real customers. For this switch emulator I'm not sure this is the case - I'd say the vast majority are people pirating.

This isn't collateral damage though; Ryujinx's developers (read: "law-abiding folks") were the target of this attack by Nintendo. That piracy may be impacted as a result is incidental.

I would argue that while the developers where the de-facto targets, the true targets are individuals who pirate. However, they're too plentiful and too anonymous to pursue. So, instead, innocent people were targeted.

This, to me, aligns with what we see with many measures, like locking up razor blades. The thiefs are the true target, but they're hard to sift out. So we target the average consumer in practice, who is innocent. They become collateral.

It's a difficult problem because there are both innocent people and actual economic harm being done, and we really need to resolve both of those. Technology helps a lot with this, I mean this is essentially why DRM exists. Yes DRM is sucky, but DRM also allows you to have media on your devices at all. Otherwise, it wouldn't be economically viable, and it would be pulled across the board.

>Yeah. It's a bummer because I actually own the games and just want to play them at 4k60 rather than on the weak HW of the Switch. But I understand why Nintendo would target emulators of a _current gen console_.

People here are either pro open source and nothing should be copyrighted or patented, on the other end where company has the right to do what ever it want.

This comment finally has someone hitting the middle ground somewhere.

"criminals will do crime" is a crappy argument for making the lives of law abiding citizens considerably worse.

Not sure if not being able to play Zelda at 4k60 is making life considerably worse.

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