[KeytarHero]

> Emulators are legal, including emulators for current-gen systems. Switch emulation is exactly as legal as Gameboy emulation.

I know you're talking about emulators, not ROMs. But it's also worth mentioning that the legality of Switch ROMs actually is quite different from Game Boy ROMs. I was recently surprised to discover archive.org has ROMs for older systems - IANAL, but apparently this is covered by a DMCA exemption for obsolete formats [1]. Also, Switch ROMs are encrypted on the cartridge, and while I really don't know the details, breaking the encryption also seems to open another legal can of worms (remember when people would get tattoos of the DVD encryption key?).

Once again IANAL, but I suspect Nintendo would have a better case against videos that include instructions on acquiring & decrypting Switch ROMs. I'm not sure if that's the case with these videos or not.

[1] https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

[danShumway]

That's an excellent point, thanks for mentioning it. There's a lot of grey area around older ROMs specifically with the Internet Archive because if I remember correctly I think they were granted some extra privileges, but in general distributing most ROMs are illegal period even for older systems. The only way to legally own them is to rip them yourself.

And breaking DRM is usually illegal regardless of whether or not you're doing it for a legal purpose. IANAL, but I think you're right, I suspect Nintendo would probably have a much better case if they went after people showing how to rip ROMs. I have a hard time keeping up with what is and isn't an exception to the DMCA, since it changes occasionally. There are some systems like phones where showing people how to bypass DRM is legal, every once and a while a big list of exception "categories" gets decided, and anything that's not on that list is illegal to bypass DRM for and illegal to show people how to bypass DRM.

It's a little weird. Emulators are legal and for many non-encrypted systems hacking and dumping your own ROMs is legal; but breaking DRM even if you're not doing anything illegal by breaking DRM -- the act itself is often illegal, and I don't remember if an exception was ever made for consoles or not.

One thing for certain, people will say that you can buy a game and then download the ROM, and maybe you can argue it's moral, but it's not legal -- the only way to legally extract a Switch ROM is to buy a Switch, hack it, and literally extract the ROM yourself (and like you mention, even that can be of questionable legality). So we run into a situation where the emulator is legal, talking about the emulator is legal, but getting media to run on the emulator, even if you're not "stealing it" by any commonly understood definition of the term is likely illegal.

Basically it boils down to whether bypassing the DRM falls into one of the current DMCA exceptions, whether you're a library, etc... and I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know if consoles are currently on that list or not.