Australian copyright law hasn't directly tested the legality of emulators, but the few legal precedents that do exist in Australian law would suggest that they would prevail. To make an emulator, emu authors have to reverse engineer software that is hard coded in ROM chips. Australia's closest legal precedent for reverse engineering was a case where a software developer sued one of its clients for altering software it had sold to them. The defendant successfully argued that the continued use of the software required that it be altered for it to work correctly on the hardware platform they had upgraded to after purchasing it. The courts weren't equivocal about tasks associated with reverse engineering, such as copying BIOS software. The main test case that has come before US courts (Connectix v. Sony) also favoured emulation authors, but this outcome was unique to the particulars of that case and a similar test may not succeed again in the US, let alone Australia.
It's legal here as there haven't been court cases about roms in our country thsan say the us
Australia
Moderators: Cat_7, Ronald P. Regensburg
What people don't seem to grasp is that it's really not illegal to make an emulator...it's pretty illegal to use the copyrighted ROM code though -- it belongs to Apple, and there are no two ways around that. They can sue, not unlike the RIAA, anybody who is using their ROM (and MacOS I believe because it's licensed to run on Apple-built computers only).
-
Stephen Coates
- Expert User
- Posts: 868
- Joined: Sat Aug 30, 2003 4:15 pm
- Location: UK
- Contact:
I think the macos is only for use on apple labled/apple licensed computers, not just apple built computers.phirkel wrote:What people don't seem to grasp is that it's really not illegal to make an emulator...it's pretty illegal to use the copyrighted ROM code though -- it belongs to Apple, and there are no two ways around that. They can sue, not unlike the RIAA, anybody who is using their ROM (and MacOS I believe because it's licensed to run on Apple-built computers only).