What are the actual laws in Japan regarding emulation, specifically? Even most foreigners living there don't seem to know, with people on web forums and Rddit threads mostly spouting off a bunch of "I think" and "it's probably" and "I'm not actuall familiar with the nuances of Japanese law, but I'd guess" and other such nonsense.From what I can gather:>Retro consoles and games are abundant and relatively cheap, so emulation is not as popular>Downloading is illegal, but not really enforced>Selling ROMs/running a ROM site is taken roughly as seriously by authorities as murdering a hospital full of babies with chemical weapons>Major corps consider emulation to be illegal altogether, but it's really in a grey area>Circumventing any copy protection is illegal>A small number of nerdy Japanese do engage in retro emulation>Your average Japanese doesn't understand emulation and thinks people who do it are roughly on the same level as drug dealers because "it's piracy, which is against the law">Console modding is not illegal, but offering modding services is>Distributing edited save files is illegal>Making backups of owned physical media can be legal, but not if it involves circumventing copy protection do so>Even jailbreaking iPhones is an actual crime
Emulation has been officially legal in the US since the Sony - Bleem trial; and this set a precedent that the whole world follows.Japan also has emulation, re-releases and collections on various platforms like Steam, emulators you can use on your phone including ones you have to pay for, etc Same as everybody else.
>>12584207IIRC, Japanese emudevs seem to focus more on their home-grown computers than they do any of the well-known consoles.
>>12584207>Emulation has been officially legal in the US since the Sony - Bleem trial; and this set a precedent that the whole world followsRemember when Nintendo's website continued to claim emulation was illegal even after Sony v. Bleem?
>>12584207I mean, no? That wasn't a binding precedent anywhere but the U.S. Other countries have their own laws - some of which in Japan are very similar to the ones in the U.S., but not all.>emulation, re-releases and collections on various platformsI'm obviously not talking about companies legally emulating their own hardware. I'm wondering what the likelihood is of getting denied entry to the country if customs opens my computer and sees a hard drive full of roms or to what degree I could actually get in trouble for downloading and playing them if I walked directly into a police station, showed them my collection and told them what site I downloaded them from.In the U.S., downloading isn't technically a crime, just a civil matter a company can sue you over if they want to. Distribution is the crime (and then only sometimes). You could walk into your local FBI office and show them your complete collection of every video game ever made and they're not going to do anything about it; I'm not sure that's the case in Japan. I figured somebody here would know.>emulators you can use on your phoneI know that emulation exists and isn't technically illegal on its own, but my understanding is that they still take a dim view of playing roms and call that "illegal" and that there might not technically be any way to legally play commercial roms in an emulator under Japanese law, even if you dump them yourself? Not that anyone would necessarily care at all, especially in that case, just that format shifting (particularly for backed up games not being played on original hardware) isn't as protected under Japanese law as it is under U.S. law or something.>>12584442Yeah, and I think they still claim it's illegal in Japan (even if they're wrong) because it hasn't been officially tested in Japanese court.But I'm wondering if some filthy weeb here is able to give more specific and reliable information.
I know they love their Retro Freaks but that's about it
>>12584650Wow! It looks so much better. I need to get one of these.
I know nothing about the legality of emulation in nipland, but like you say they do in a general sense take a dim view of it, as it's impolite and akin to taking someone's property without consent, even in the case of corporations. Of course, it's even worse if you ask actual devs or creators, regardless of whether their work is localized or available for purchase outside Japan. If you wanna see this in action, find some doujin artist on Twatter or whatever, send them a message gushing about how much you love their work but make sure to specifically mention that you read an online scanlation because you had no other recourse, and watch the seethe unfold.
emulation in japan seems like how it was in 2000's in the west. looked down upon but tons of people don't care. japan has been emulating games since forever. you got people in the shmup community that think japs dont emulate, but then you got old websites like this https://mog.yokochou.com/page5.html that have good replays from 20+ years ago
>>12584640>I mean, no? That wasn't a binding precedent anywhere but the U.S. Other countries have their own laws - some of which in Japan are very similar to the ones in the U.S., but not all.Yes, but it still works as a deterent everywhere else. The Bleem trial went the way it was because it was deciding that forbidding emulation would be allowing an unfair market dominance; although Americans are more proud of their free market than most, the concept of competition is still one of the binding principles of capitalism worldwide. Why else do you think nobody's else made an attempt since the Bleem trial? As you said it may only be official in the US but it's a worldwide example.>I'm obviously not talking about companies legally emulating their own hardware.My examples included more things than that. When some guy writes a new emulator and sells it for mobile phones, it's no different than Bleem. When Capcom or Konami or Square Enix re-releases a game emulated on another platform than their original, like Steam and such, it's no different than Bleem. Those examples are more than just "Super Mario Bros 3 on Nintendo's own Virtual Console"; and they do exist in Japan too.
>>12584161I don't know. Try throwing the Japanese Wikipedia article for emulation through Google Translate.
>>12585120>>12584640Come to think of it, the outcome of the Sony - Bleem trial is very similar to that of IBM suing its clones. That trial was also US only, but nobody needed to waste their time with a similar case in every country, it was enough to work as an example worldwide and the computer and the programs you're using as we speak (assuming you're not a dirty phone poster) are the direct proof of that.
It isZETTAI DAME
>>12584640>I'm wondering what the likelihood is of getting denied entry to the country if customs opens my computer and sees a hard drive full of romsLmao they don't give a fuck about that and they're not going through your hard drive. You're not going to get party vanned for downloading roms there either it's not a fucking police state. Stop being a scared little pussy, ffs.
>>12584207It was actually Sony v Connectix which set that precedent. The Bleem case was (nominally) about whether or not Bleem's side-by-side comparisons in their advertising/packaging constituted fair use of apparently-copyrighted screenshots of Sony's games.
>>12585226There were two trials between Sony and Bleem, the other one was about whether or not Bleem had to right to make PlayStation games play on another machine
>>12584161Decent summary, a few things worth clarifying though. The emulator software itself is unambiguously legal — no Japanese law prohibits it. The corps claiming otherwise are being disingenuous or deliberately conflating emulators with piracy, which are legally distinct. What's actually illegal is obtaining the ROMs, not running the emulator.On circumventing copy protection, it's slightly more nuanced than a blanket ban. What it actually does is void your private-use exception under Article 30 of the Copyright Act. Without that exception, any copy you make is infringement. Older cartridges with no copy protection (roughly pre-Saturn era) don't trigger this, so dumping those from hardware you own sits in genuinely legal territory. It's modern stuff with actual DRM where you're out of luck.The console modding point undersells how broad the 2018 Unfair Competition Prevention Act amendment actually is. Offering modding services and distributing modding tools are clearly illegal, but personal modding of your own hardware is genuinely ambiguous under the law — I wouldn't call it cleanly legal the way you've framed it.Download penalties are worth knowing: up to 10 years and ¥10M on paper, though you're right that individuals never get touched. Distribution is where they actually prosecute, and the penalties there are savage — corporations can face ¥300M fines. "Hospital full of babies" is hyperbole but not by much.
It looks like Nintendo does differentiate between "unauthorized" and "unlawful" emulators, but it paints both as bad.>being able to play games in "unintended" ways can "negatively affect" my "gameplay experience"Ugh
>>12586538Jesus, what a desperate paragraph
>>12586538I mean nobody's disagreeing that emulators are never the same as the real hardware, but they still shouldn't pretend it's illegal.
>>12584161It's legal.What do you think the Nintendo Online releases of games are running on?
>>12587216What if Japanese law said "End users can only run an emulator provided to them by the manufacturer of the original hardware it's emulating?" Asking a question about what the actual laws are instead of just trusting generations of forum heresy is a valid topic.
>>12585270Yeah, it looks like Nintendo does acknowledge that emulators themselves are legal under Japanese law, but only some emulators. Yuzu (and I guess Dolphin and others by extension?) is probably illegal under Japanese law because it contains code to decrypt encrypted roms.https://automaton-media.com/en/news/nintendos-attorney-weighs-in-on-what-makes-emulators-illegal/>“To begin with, are emulators illegal or not? This is a point often debated. While you can’t immediately claim that an emulator is illegal in itself, it can become illegal depending on how it’s used,” Nishiura says.>If an emulator copies a program belonging to the game device it’s imitating, that can constitute copyright infringement. If the emulator has a function that disables security mechanisms such as encryption (legally referred to as “technical protection measures”), it may be considered a violation of Japan’s Unfair Competition Prevention Act, according to Nishiura (he mentions that outside of Japan, the latter is likely to be stipulated in copyright law).I realize nobody in practice is getting arrested for downloading Dolphin or Yuzu, but is possession of a decryption program itself criminal, or is it just development and distribution that will get you in trouble? He seems to imply that the program itself is explicitly criminal under Japanese law, even though it would be civil in most other countries.
>>12584161Emulation is fine, their actual problem is with piracy and piracy groups distributing full games for free download. Japan only goes after emulators when it helps facilitate piracy, hasn't stopped them from releasing a shit ton of retro game collections and whatnot to Steam.
