[Wowfunhappy]

> I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team.

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.)

[LocalH]

Emulators are unambiguously legal as long as the emulator author doesn't distribute copyrighted software without permission, and as long as no encryption is involved (recent action by Nintendo have made that bit a little unclear).

[pbhjpbhj]

In all jurisdictions? What are the principal pieces of caselaw?

[hnlmorg]

I don’t know of any country where emulation is illegal? Do you?

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.

[Belopolye]

To my knowledge emulation is illegal in Japan, as is modding consoles.

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.

[fallpeak]

People still make games for old consoles occasionally as hobby projects, and those are usually released freely as ROM files. I'm not familiar with Japanese law, but in most countries that would constitute a fairly solid proof that there are legal uses to which an emulator can be applied and thus that emulation itself isn't inherently illegal.

[hnlmorg]

You’re talking about software piracy, which the UK and US, and most of the developed world too, also has strict laws for.

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.

[MobiusHorizons]

What about games that come on cd or dvd media? Some emulators can run directly from the disk without creating a rom.

[jayd16]

You don't need to be doing something wrong to get crushed by legal fees.

[kartoffelsaft]

Curious what makes you say it'd be less legally dubious than an emulator? To me, it seems this would be at the same legality as the NES emulator because you're basically 'emulating' the environment Roblox game code runs in. To be fair if that intuition's correct it'd still be legal like emulators are if they're careful.

(also not a lawyer)

[conradev]

  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.

Emulators often require handling copyrighted materials like games or firmware, whereas APIs are not copyrightable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America...

[LocalH]

The NES itself contains no code. Any NES emulator that ships with no software, or software under proper license (such as homebrew) is unambiguously legal. Does your PC, and the OS that drives it, suddenly become inherently illegal if you, as a user, installed pirated software? No, of course not.

[conradev]

Absolutely! It’s completely, unambiguously legal, which is why Google allows emulators on the Play Store.

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.

[pbhjpbhj]

No firmware, no microcode? It's all completely hard-wired?

(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.)

[zeta0134]

Nope! The system does include a CIC lockout chip, but emulators pretend it doesn't exist. The CPU immediately begins executing game code at power on. There is no BIOS or operating system, and indeed no fixed ROM inside the console at all.

[ronsor]

No firmware, no microcode. The NES uses an old 8-bit CPU and a few custom chips; at the time, including firmware would've been too costly (think of the RAM and ROM!).

[RealStickman_]

VLC is French, so the US law on software patents doesn't apply to it.

[Wowfunhappy]

I want to be very clear that I'm not saying either VLC or emulators are illegal. I'm just saying, to the extent that it's possible to make a strained case that something is illegal, TFA strikes me as being on even firmer footing.

[shortrounddev2]

The supreme court ruled against oracle that an API cannot be copyrighted, but Roblox can still ban you for using an unofficial client (like discord does)

[dragonwriter]

No, it didn't. It also didn't rule in favor of Oracle that the Java was protected by the copyright on Java. It just ruled that Google's use of the parts of the API in reimplementing it would be Fair Use even if it was protected, and therefore there was no need to answer the question of whether it was protected.

(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.)

[kragen]

No, they ruled that the copyright on the API was valid, but that Google's infringement of it fell within the bounds of fair use. This was an enormous setback for free software potentially opening the doors for things like lawsuits against WINE for having too much of an impact on the Microsoft Windows market.

[dragonwriter]

> No, they ruled that the copyright on the API was valid

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.

[kragen]

Thank you for the correction. I clearly misremembered. It was the Federal Circuit that ruled that the API was copyrightable, not the Supreme Court: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

[dragonwriter]

Yeah, but the difference is, the precedential weight of Federal Circuit decisions on copyright is about the same as the precedential weight of HN posts on copyright.

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.

[kragen]

I see. But don't circuit courts generally weigh each other's opinions rather highly, even if they aren't actually required to? And possibly a future vexatious litigant like Oracle might concoct some far-fetched patent claim to put some future lawsuit into the Federal Circuit as well?

[poly2it]

For what it's worth, I don't think there is any known case of a Discord user being banned for using an unofficial client yet.

https://vencord.dev/faq/#Will-I-get-banned-for-using-Vencord...?

[a2128]

There have been cases and a whole project was shut down because of it https://github.com/Bios-Marcel/cordless?tab=readme-ov-file#i...

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)

[999900000999]

Two factors are at play.

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

[giancarlostoro]

> It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator

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.

[axus]

The open source part is key. Plenty of online Pokemon and World of Warcraft clones out there, they can't seem to catch them all.

[lukan]

No need to. But anything too succesful should be ready to be brought down any moment.

[Imustaskforhelp]

pokemon showdown is insanely and I mean insanely successful but it seems to have been almost blessed by the pokemon company.

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.

[gjsman-1000]

In practice, no society has ever overcome “might makes right.” Or, arguably, ever will.

The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.

[DANmode]

The Pirate Bay, SciHub.

The Internet interprets censorship (legal, moral, or otherwise) as damage, and routes around it.

[kragen]

No, that isn't how routing works on the internet. John was talking about Usenet. Usenet's routing does work that way.

[DANmode]

That's how users work on the Internet.

and anyway, I heard Usenet is dead ;]

[kragen]

News at 11.

[Muromec]

The actual piracy also existed, until it wasnt

[zip8370]

It still does

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy_in_the_21st_century