[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.