On The Legality Of Emulators? 11
identity0 asks: "I was looking at old Slashdot stories, and there seems to be a few stories about various console emulators being sued for copyright and/or patent infringement. Now I have a question: is there a legal difference between "hardware emulators" like the console emulators, and "software emulators" like WINE? And what are the legalities of both kinds of emulators? The WINE FAQ says it's not an emulator because 'Wine provides low-level binary compatibility, but currently only for OSes running on Intel-compatible chips.' - but since Windows also only runs on Intel boxes, I think I can call it an emulator."
Not an emulator (Score:2)
Re:Not an emulator (Score:1)
so far, so good. (Score:3)
While the legality of emulators has been questioned several times, I'm not aware of any court decisions against emulators in general.
For the play station emulator the court said there was no imfringement even though code from the playstation was used in devoplment, because that code was not shiped to customers, and they needed to use it to reverse engineer the product. This is a major victory, but who much presidence it will set needs to be seen.
Warning, attempts to pass new comsumor laws may change this. Put the Your Rights Online seciont of /. on the main page for you view and read the stories! The write your congressmen often.
Re:Not an emulator (Score:1)
WINE is not an emulator (Score:2)
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
Re:Not an emulator (Score:3)
Point 1. Although wine CAN use native windows dlls, it doesn't require them.
Point 2. Connectix's Virtual PC (usually) comes with a copy of windows and I don't believe that there is any doubt that it IS an emulator.
Point 3. How do you define emulator?
LK
Legal Precedent? (Score:2)
IANAL, but I think that it came down to "Well, the playstation is a black box. We don't know what happens inside, just that these patterns of input equal these outputs. Our program responds the same way as the playstation, but the insides are probably very different."
I much prefer SEGA's method of dealing with emulators: hire the guy who was good enough to write them. (As far as I know, Steve Snake, author of KGen, [probably one of the 2-3 best sega genesis emulators in existance] is currently working for sega to produce all those "Sega PC" titles you see on discount racks for $10. (Sonic & Knuckles, etc) They're actually mini-emulators, with the rom image!)
Legal. (Score:2)
I have a rather simple view on it - How many of these companies have actually filed lawsuits against the authors of emulation software? Not threatened, but filed. Sony attempted it against Bleem but failed. Nobody else has even tried. Distributing roms is a different matter - quite illegal as it is piracy, but no companies really enforce it.
I look at slander/libel in a similar vein. If you say something outrageous about someone/something on a strong enough platform and they don't file suit, it is quite likely to be true.
Re: A researcher who says low-sugar alternatives (inc. specific products) are worse for diabetics than sugar itself thanks to some substance that is in them.
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Emulation and its inherent legality (Score:1)
Hardware emulation: If you open up a console or have proprietary information regarding how it works (anything not publicly released), then your emulator is illegal (assuming the patent still protects it). The emulator needs to be reverse engineered the same way you'd reverse engineer it for hardware. You can look at the inputs and the outputs, but you have to treat the middle as a "black box." If it happens to resemble to original, then your mind just happened to follow their designer's mind. If you include (for console emulation) any games, then you're violating copyright, which is illegal. If it can't be used without proprietary software and there is no way to use the original software on it, you're asking for piracy, which usually can't be put on the emulator's creator's head, but won't earn you any breaks either. To wit, the reason Bleem! won is mainly because the whole thing was reverse engineered, it plays original Sony PSX CDs, and includes nothing except the emulator. I believe Bleem is a High-Level Emulator (HLE) meaning it recognizes code chunks ahead of time and responds to them (as in, it might recognize a "draw polygon at these coordinates with this color" chunk of code, and it will execute that relatively rapidly. The alternative is one which would read, convert and run each instruction separately). This leads to minor errors, since the code chunk may be imperfectly recognized or imperfectly executed, but causes a great increase in speed.
Software emulation: For things like WINE, I'm not sure what the legality of it is. As long as you have no proprietary information on the original software, I think you're basically safe. That's why there can be half-a-dozen clone word-processors out there. There's only a finite number of ways to write efficient code, and to create a relatively easy interface. Actually, I can think of very few things which emulate only software.
VirtualPC is a hardware emulation, by the way. It creates an emulation of an entire PC, including motherboard, BIOS, CPU, sound card (I think the new version has SB emulation in it now...), video card, ethernet, possibly a modem... Everything. Then you run any OS you want on top of that. They have specialized routines for specific OSes to run faster, which is why you specify an OS to emulate.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"
It does not. (Score:1)
WINE-Wine Is Not an Emulator
Depending on your definition
Shoot yourself in the foot, why don't you... (Score:1)
Windows NT was demonstrated running on Axp before x86. There are even other architectures which it runs on. Look at and on your installation CD, they're listed there.
On the topic of Emulators - Fx32 absolutely rocks, well done the coders at Digital.