For now at least. Given Nintendo's efforts to get rid of Yuzu and Ryujinx I think it's likely that the legal days may be numbered. All they have to do is get it in front of the right judge(s) and the precedent by the Connectix and the Bleem lawsuits is undone.
Not that I particularly care if it's legal; I seriously doubt anyone is going to break into my house to seize my MiSTer as contraband, but I think it's entirely possible that emulation progress stalls because it's forced to move into the shadows.
In the music industry they have a saying about sampling and IP clearance which easily applies here too: "The lawfulness of your actions is directly related to your law firm fees compared to the other part".
Are Dolphin and emulation in general going to be legal in the future? Easy, if Nintendo chooses to go with Morrison & Foerster or Fish & Richardson for a lawsuit I'm going with "no".
That depends on the country. In Australia, there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs[1], and there is also a widely held belief (at least, according to the government) that backups of this kind in general are also considered fair use[2]. Actually, it seems there is a somewhat similar carve-out in the US as well[3].
>there is an explicit carve-out in the Copyright Act to allow for backups of computer programs
But there is not a carve out for breaking DRM to do so. It's not the backup part that is the problem with dumping them. It's that these games are encrypted and decrypting them requires breaking the DRM scheme which is illegal.
There is a separate carve-out for breaking DRM for the purposes of "interoperability"[1], which (as far as I understand) is generally believed to include emulators.
I also disagree more broadly with the initial moral indignation over a perceived violation of copyright law -- legality and morality are two different things, copyright law is meant to be a balanced trade-off between the public and creators but modern copyright laws are a travesty. What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?
>will be done for the sole purpose of achieving interoperability
It's for solely achieving interoperability. It only covers the development of the emulator. Using it to get a picture for explaining what a game is in the blog post is not DRM being broken for solely achieving interoperability.
>What ever happened to the hacker ethos behind DeCSS and the anti-"illegal numbers" movement?
In practice the idea that you can't break laws if you are doing things via a computer is fundamentally flawed.
