I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal.
If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android.
(Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, etc.)
This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something.
Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits.
In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours
The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.
The Internet interprets censorship (legal, moral, or otherwise) as damage, and routes around it.
and anyway, I heard Usenet is dead ;]
I genuinely don't know how its legal, when I shared the link to pokemon showdown to one of my friends, his first thoughts was, wait how is this legal? This is such a good thing, I wonder why this is free. Only for me to tell it its open source and bro was flabbergasted to say the least.
Its meant to be running live so you can play the many dynamic roblox games, I guess you could but it would be a mess.
(also not a lawyer)
So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America...
(Genuine question, I've no idea what chips it uses or anything - was never rich enough to have a game console until I started work myself.)
Apple, beholden to copyright interests, is wary of software that allows even the possibility of copyright infringement. They just recently allowed video game emulators on their store.
It’s not a legal distinction, sure, but it’s also not apples to apples.
As the GP pointed out, OEMs use copyright and encryption to protect against unapproved execution. But that doesn’t apply to all systems.
Given countries like the UK and US have the strictest intellectual property and computer misuse laws, and emulation is legal there (bar the aforementioned caveats), I’d be surprised if there was a jurisdiction where emulation was illegal. However if you do know of somewhere then please do share.
Edit: I looked into it a bit more. As it is against the law to dump ROMs from games you have legally purchased, as well as acquiring them through other channels, there is no way to emulate games in Japan in a legal manner.
However new games are constantly released for old consoles and often sold as ROMs. Which is completely legal because they own the copyright and distribution rights to those games.
Also modern variants of old consoles will typically use emulation with ROMs approved for distribution, such as:
- The SNES Classic Mini
- The Wii Virtual Console
- The Switch Online, SNES
All of these are official Nintendo products. All of them available in Japan. And all of them use emulation under the hood with ROMs that Nintendo supply and have legal authority to distribute.
You can also take this point further and talk about uses of emulation outside of gaming too. Such as emulated hardware components in a virtual machine.
https://vencord.dev/faq/#Will-I-get-banned-for-using-Vencord...?
However this is an entirely different question. Whether or not an API is copyrightable, and whether you'd be in violation for recreating a proprietary API for the purpose of creating an (open-source) market alternative for their product, are entirely different questions to whether or not a specific private company has stopped serving specific customers due to use of software they do not authorize (which they are entirely in the right to do, legally)
No, they didn't. They very specifically did not rule on whether the API was protected by Oracle's copyright on Java.
> but that Google's infringement of it fell within the bounds of fair use.
They found that, even if the API was protected, Google's use would be within the scope of fair use, and therefore it was not necessary to decide the question of the underlying copyright.
Here is, in full, the opening paragraph of the decision:
Oracle America, Inc., is the current owner of a copyright in Java SE, a computer program that uses the popular Java computer programming language. Google, without permission, has copied a portion of that program, a portion that enables a programmer to call up prewritten software that, together with the computer’s hardware, will carry out a large number of specific tasks. The lower courts have considered (1) whether Java SE’s owner could copyright the portion that Google copied, and (2) if so, whether Google’s copying nonetheless constituted a “fair use” of that material, thereby freeing Google from copyright liability. The Federal Circuit held in Oracle’s favor (i.e., that the portion is copyrightable and Google’s copying did not constitute a “fair use”). In reviewing that decision, we assume, for argument’s sake, that the material was copyrightable. But we hold that the copying here at issue nonetheless constituted a fair use. Hence, Google’s copying did not violate the copyright law.
Had the case not been in the Federal Circuit because it used to have patent issues, and had the xase instead stayed in the Ninth Circuit and had that Circuit ruled that and the Supreme Court left that part of the decision untouched, there would be binding precedent, if only in the Ninth Circuit. But on issues other than its special ones (patents, in this case) the Federal Circuit is to apply precedent from the Circuit the case would otherwise be in, but does not create binding precedent.
So, other than between Oracle and Google themselves, the parties to the original case, as a matter of res judicata, the Federal Circuit decision isn't controlling on any future court the way a Supreme Court decision or even a decision of one of the geographic circuits would be.
(This may seem backwards because it is skipping over a more basic question to a question that should only matter after that has been answered, but the Supreme Court can answer questions in any order it chooses, and will often answer the question that is easiest [and least disruptive/impactful] to answer first even when it seems logically backwards, if that lets it not answer other questions.)
You need to make custom servers. In fact, make a server that patched official clients can connect to. That's the correct order of operations.
The virtual world called Second Life, considered similar to Roblox, also has a rampant child predator problem[3]. It is interesting because Second Life and Roblox are similar 3D worlds. Both experiences have a similar visual feel. Both experiences do very little KYC, resulting in a rampant alt problem. In fact, Second Life will begin using the same version of Lua used by Roblox, so in some ways they are even technologically-related 3D experiences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roblox_Schlep_ban_controversy
[2] https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2025/08/more-on-removal-of-...
[3] https://archive.is/yjprF (Feb 2024)