I really can't stand Nintendo's anti-emulation propoganda. They try really hard to convince you that it's both 100% illegal and immoral to use emulators (even if you own the games), but look at Wii. Nintendo claims that emulators themselves are illegal (not just ROMs), yet will sell you ROMs that they have bought the rights to for play on THEIR emulators. Do they expect you to own the originals of those? No. They're just making a profit on other people's work. Look at this in particular:
"The introduction of emulators created to play illegally copied Nintendo software represents the greatest threat to date to the intellectual property rights of video game developers."
Intellectual property rights of video game developers? These "intellectual property rights" are owned by the game companies themselves, not the developers. And what's more, they're free to be bought and sold on a whim for a profit, which is exactly what Nintendo is doing. For most games that are emulated today the original authors stopped having anything to do with the game a long time ago, and many of them aren't even employed at the company that owns the game rights anymore. They certainly don't make anything like royalties off of them. Nintendo actually tries to present this as if it's a matter of retaining the intellectual integrity of people who make games, when anyone who makes for a living has basically zero rights to their work. They'd have considerably more rights if they made the games for free.
"Nintendo is famous for bringing back to life its popular characters for its newer systems, for example, Mario and Donkey Kong have enjoyed their adventures on all Nintendo platforms, going from coin-op machines to our latest hardware platforms. As a copyright owner, and creator of such famous characters, only Nintendo has the right to benefit from such valuable assets."
Emphasis on "creator." Nintendo obviously thinks nothing of buying out the rights to several titles they didn't create for usage on Wii. Certainly they would never sell their own "assets", but as far as their actions indicate "copyright owner" is just a bought title to them. It's about money, that's all. Not only does Nintendo have the right to do whatever they want with other people's games, but they have the right to MAKE money off of them. In other words, whereas piraters merely get the games for free, Nintendo is both getting the game and making a profit of it. This is legitimized because the original "owners" of the "intellectual property" are paid off for this, and accept/allow it. However, since they long stopped making money off the products it's nothing more than a free gift to them. If someone sold a whole bunch of old ROMs on eBay for a company that couldn't care less about it (and isn't going to bother taking legal action against them), then gives a cut of the profit to that company, do you think Nintendo would suddenly be okay with them? Sure, if they bought the rights beforehand, but no company is going to do that, because it goes against their legal protocol and would damage their image (Nintendo talks a lot about image too, and how ROMs undermine it... they clearly want to maintain a stronghold on the mentality of their buyers).
Face it, this isn't about human rights, it's only about the ability for big companies to make money from nothing. Note I'm talking about emulating old games that have long since lost profitability in their original format and have long since made a significant return on their initial investment.
Companies like Nintendo are just greedy, and they'll tell the public anything to get them on their side, then behind the scenes go against everything they've been claiming if it better suits them.
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