Quote Originally Posted by Greg2600 View Post
Believe it or not, but the legal foothold on emulators and any reverse engineering of software at all was set by the Sega vs. Accolade trial in the early 90's. So if you reverse engineer to learn how a console works, and then develop your *own* code to mimick that, it is legal and ethical. Frankly I think the same could be said of ROM's, but nobody is going to do that. Yet it would only really apply to the game's basic design. Any of the characters or logos would likely be trademarked.
Well, that's just a different scenario altogether. That case was to develop software for proprietary hardware, was it not? This is a case of developing software to circumvent the hardware, denying NEC any sort of profit or ownership of their own developed hardware. Also, I think it is a bold statement to say that case made an ethical statement, although clearly a legal one. Was it ethical for the Intellivision to play Atari cartridges? Legal by loophole, sure, but my argument stands on the unethical side.

Quote Originally Posted by PingvinBlueJeans View Post
How is it unethical to charge for a program you put time a lot and effort into (no matter what it does)? They charge for the emulator, not the ROMS (which no one indeed has the right to charge for). I don't follow you.
So let's say NEC comes out with a system next year that plays their back catalogue, or better yet releases their games on the virtual console. With emulation available, I think you would have a hard time arguing that this doesn't cut away from their profits, and worse yet, someone who profits from the loss of profits from said company. You can argue all day about the emulators not being released with any copyrighted roms, but you would be lying if you said it was not the developer's intention to play illegal roms on the software.

I can understand the effort of developing such software (I am a software developer), but that doesn't make it right to sell it. In one sense I can respect the choices of some who chose to attack the 'system': developing emulators, cracking copyright protections, etc., even though I may disagree with these choices ethically, but to charge for such software is selfish and clearly with harmful intent.