> So yes, emulation can be used with games you actually own, and doing so has great advantages.

I'm not denying that is one use case, what I'm saying is that it's very unlikely it's the regular one.

Nintendo's argument is basically that even if that were true, just because you purchased it once doesn't give you the right to it indefinitely. You might disagree with that, but that's their stance (when you buy e-Shop games you don't even get access across Nintendo consoles).

> just because you purchased it once doesn't give you the right to it indefinitely

Did I buy it or rent it? If I bought it then I damn well do have the right to it indefinitely.

One might say that you bought a license to a game. And that license includes only being run from the physical copy you received. Nintendo is only getting worse with this over time. Just see for example the Breath of the Wild DLC... No physical copy to be obtained, forever bound to your nintendo account.

> One might say that you bought a license to a game

One might claim that, and that claim should be rejected.

Isn’t this how the market works? You don’t own the game - you own the game on the platform, for as long as it lasts. This is the base rule for console games. You kinda know the deal when you buy it.

> This is the base rule for console games.

Really not well established, no. You may "know the deal" but the idea that your ownership is time limited by the life of the platform is unlikely to hold up well in a legal setting, IMHO.

Multiple court cases have established that emulation is legal, and that emulators are "transformative". "This innovation affords opportunities for game play in new environments".

Old hardware is often repairable/refurbish-able though.

It's not acceptable to prohibit a use case because some people are using it for illicit purposes, assuming that all aren't.

Game producers would like to claim that all such uses are fundamentally illicit. The point of my comment was to reject that claim, not to claim that the majority of users are licit.

(There's a separate argument that I'd also make that all such uses should be entirely accepted, but that's an orthogonal argument that I'm not making here.)

> It's not acceptable to prohibit a use case because some people are using it for illicit purposes, assuming that all aren't.

Sure it is. Try extending this argument to every other kind of business. Most shops, for example, don’t let you take whatever you want off the shelves and promise to mail them a check later. Even if many people would be honest, enough wouldn’t that it would make their business unsustainable (or at least substantially less profitable). Therefore, they almost universally prohibit this.

That’s just one example among many. The logical conclusion of your argument is that it’s unacceptable for any business not to extend unlimited trust to all their customers unconditionally.

You don't own the stuff on the shelves though?

I agree that games that has been commercially available sometime in the last year shouldn't be pirated (and I'm not sure at what point in time after the last time it was commercially available that it becomes permissible, and so I haven't pirated any games, unless you count an unreleased in-progress demo of a game that got discovered, and which I have a physical copy of what the game eventually became).

But my hardware is mine. I can do what I want with it.

Why is it not acceptable if a machine is not being used for its intended purposes and most people using it are for pirating games?

Why is there any notion of acceptability for a company’s rulings on how their copyrights should be protected?

> Why is there any notion of acceptability for a company’s rulings on how their copyrights should be protected?

From a legal perspective, there's not, companies can attack copyright infringement even if they don't do it in a moral or acceptable way.

However, from a legal perspective, emulators don't violate copyright and neither do videos teaching people how to use them. So if we want to talk about the acceptability of Nintendo claiming copyright on emulator videos, and if we want talk about the morality of emulating systems that are current-gen, and if we want to talk about the "typical use case" of emulation, then we're not really talking about laws anymore. In the context of those questions, it is valid to talk about whether or not a company's motivations are "acceptable", because we're not talking about legality.

The law is already settled on this point, building and distributing emulators is legal activity, even for current-generation systems. Social convention/responsibility are the only things people can debate about emulators. And legally speaking, at least a portion of these videos are probably fine (of course, Nintendo is unlikely to be called out on this because nobody wants to get sued even wrongfully over a Youtube video). We can debate whether or not they're responsible to make and post online, and we can debate whether or not they contribute to piracy, but legally they're probably not copyright infringement.

Nintendo is under no legal obligation to wield its copyright acceptably or responsibly, but also people who build emulators are under no legal obligation to make sure that no one pirates Nintendo games. I don't like how these conversations often get framed in a way where Nintendo is judged only on its legal obligations, but people who build and talk about emulators are judged on subjective social responsibilities that have nothing to do with the law.

Thank you for the detailed reply