You know? I double-checked and you are actually right: in my country copyright infringement for "personal use" is fine for movies and music and "works of art" but there is a clause excluding software programs. Game ROMs are obviously software programs.
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GBA4iOS Debuts 2.0 Update for Game Boy Emulator With iPad Support, Easy Installation
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Uh, don't assume everybody is doing things illegally.
Context clues.
What clues are you talking about? Don't assume everybody can read your mind.
Playing Nintendo games on an iOS or Android device is illegal in most countries. Why shouldn't that be assumed?
There is an interesting FAQ from the emu scene which explains the details citing the relevant cases: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/EmuFAQ2000/ in the section "Y2K Addendum: The Effects". The first link explains the legal details for emulators themselves, the second explains the legal details for ROMs.
Yep. That argument for ROMs goes hand in hand with the legal backups that I mentioned earlier. I'd love to see it tested in court to establish clearer guidelines, because "personal use" is certainly only one of several factors in establishing fair use.
But in the specific emulator being discussed in this thread, it's obvious to me that it is almost exclusively being used to play ROMs downloaded from the internet.
Uh, don't assume everybody is doing things illegally.
Context clues.
I'm assuming you're downloading roms from a site that has no legal rights to distribute them.
I'm also assuming by 'pressuring Nintendo' you're talking about Apple telling Nintendo, "Release some iOS games to our users or... whoops... we flick this switch and they all have easy access to illegal copies." That's so close to being illegal, i.e. blackmail, that I'd expect to see that tried in court.
Let's be realistic: that is the case for almost all console emulators available and that's what I don't understand. If you consider this emulator to be illegal, you should consider basically all console emulators available to be illegal too: there is nothing particularly more "suspicious" here. You just need to visit the site of the various more popular console emulator to understand that the goal is to allow ROMs of original games to be played. It's obvious that the typical user is not going to dump their own roms from original cartridges...
Moreover, Nintendo & co. would have sued them into oblivion ages ago if they actually believed to have even the slightest chance to win. Still the various Snes9x, Zsnes, VBA, FCEUltra, Dolphin ecc... stand, and some of these are decade's old projects. Even in their own "Legal FAQ" Nintendo is very harsh against emulation but never claims that emulators are illegal, even when they discuss about emulators "made to play illegal games". They do instead claim very explicitly that ROMs downloaded from Internet and "Game Copying Devices" are illegal.
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I'm not sure why you keep saying this. I provided specific examples as to when a emulator would be legal and cited legal precedent. Again, an emulator that plays xBox games directly from the original disk would be legal. And likely one that plays ROMs that the user created on their own from the original disk as a backup.
Yep. In that case, most of them are likely illegal.
In my opinion, the CD/DVD based systems are more likely to be legally justifiable in that an average user could more reasonably be expected to make their own backup ROMs.
Or... Nintendo weighed the balance of suing their users vs. protecting their copyrights and decided that discouraging the use of ROMs was more effective than a court case with little to win financially or otherwise.
This is amazing! If Nintendo would stop being so stubborn they could make a fortune. Guess I'll just download the games for free, then. I'm all about paying for things, but if I want something and it's not offered, I'm going to take advantage of the work around. We can play this morally superior 'it's stealing/illegal' game all day. I'd buy it if it was offered, but it's not.
Nintendo DOES offer the games in their virtual console. Just because you don't want to buy the hardware it's offered on doesn't mean it's ok to circumvent it.
The right thing in this case is to abstain from the game entirely if you don't like the conditions for playing it legally.
All console emulators are able to play ROMs that the user created on their own from the original disk as a backup. By your own reasoning all the console emulators I mentioned are legal and this particular emulator from this point of view is legal too: you can definately load your own ROM created from you own original disk.
What I found out is that in this emulator's website they actively instruct users to download ROMs from websites, which seems actually the only way to load ROMs. Given that they show screenshots of Nintendo games this is very likely to be considered actively inducing copyright infringement, so you are most likely right when you say that this particular emulator is likely illegal.
This is not true for all other emulator websites I know, which tend to frown upon discussing how to download copyrighted ROMs and definately don't encourage users in that direction, most likely precisely to avoid any possible "inducement" accusation.
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I guess that makes sense if you ignore the word "substantial" or pretend its not important.
From the OP, this emulator includes a browser for downloading ROMs.I'm not sure how you think that disagrees with what I said.
I actually found out the explicit instructions about ROM downloads only later and edited the post accordingly. The resulting post was pretty confusing... I then edited the post again but I see you replied to the old version, sorry about that.
About the "substantial" debate, I maintain that emulators in general are capable of substantial non infringing uses and I provided a couple of examples. What makes this particular emulator illegal in my opinion is solely the fact that they induce infringement with their ROM downloading instructions.
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I don't think that that there are many users of emulators that even have the ability to dump ROMs from the cartridge based platforms.
The "substantial" ruling in Betamax specifically referenced that the primary use of recording TV shows was considered fair use and therefore non-infringing. I don't think there are any legal uses of cartridge based emulators that would be considered "substantial".
Hard reset didn't help. Changed time back a month, runs fine. Set it back to automatic and now it seems to be working. Fingers crossed.
That seems to be how it was before 7.0.6 update after Apple pulled their license. Sounds like 7.0.6 probably didn't change anything in relation to that.
Official tech support
Hi, Alyssa Surowiec here. I handle all technical questions and support for GBA4iOS 1.6 and 2.0. If anyone has questions regarding the app (safety, controller compatibility, cheats,installation, etc.) please do not hesitate to contact me. I most frequently check the support email ( support@gba4iosapp.com) but you can also tweet me @AlyssaSurowiec and i'll get to you with an answer.
There was an update to the app today, which you can get either from the gba4iosapp website or from within your app (check for updates). Make sure you set your date back to before feb 18th before installing.. you can put it back after. There's also a wider range of GBA/GBC skins, Dropbox fix, and an Airplay "use as second screen" option to name a few of the features.
Riley worked incredibly hard on this app, and I'm super proud of him! Enjoy the glory of 2.0.
Hi, Alyssa Surowiec here. I handle all technical questions and support for GBA4iOS 1.6 and 2.0. If anyone has questions regarding the app (safety, controller compatibility, cheats,installation, etc.) please do not hesitate to contact me. I most frequently check the support email ( support@gba4iosapp.com) but you can also tweet me @AlyssaSurowiec and i'll get to you with an answer.
There was an update to the app today, which you can get either from the gba4iosapp website or from within your app (check for updates). Make sure you set your date back to before feb 18th before installing.. you can put it back after. There's also a wider range of GBA/GBC skins, Dropbox fix, and an Airplay "use as second screen" option to name a few of the features.
Riley worked incredibly hard on this app, and I'm super proud of him! Enjoy the glory of 2.0.
Remember to manually change your device date to 18th February or before. Then relaunch, and reset your date to automatic.
Edit: sorry you fixed it, i didn't read on from your first post! Enjoy!
To be honest, the new Christian Whitehead developed version of Sonic 2 for iOS is brilliant and well worth the money.