I own original hardware and buy 100% of my games but sometimes you just wanna run games that aren’t originally crossplatform on your Steamdeck for convenience, or on a PC with resolution upscaling, or for ease of streaming the gameplay, or tons of other legitimate reasons.
Can’t wait until our courts decide that, due to the prevalence of “remasters” that are just upscaled ROMs running on emulators, that this is no longer considered “fair use.”
Fair use has nothing to do with this. Fair use has to do with distributing a copyrighted work. Emulators are (ideally) running completely original code that isn’t copied from the company’s source code. This is why, for example, PCSX2 has you use “your own” PS2 BIOS instead of including it.
The PS2 BIOS is copyrighted, so it’s illegal to distribute it (and it’s never been “fair use” to distribute it). But it’s not illegal to do whatever you want with it (including dump it) as long as you own the console you’re dumping it from and as long as you don’t upload it to the internet for the purpose of distributing it to others. As far as the law is concerned, you bought the console and can do to it whatever you wish, provided you keep it to yourself and don’t distribute it to others.
Games fall under the same category. You’re free to dump your games and play them however you wish, provided you don’t distribute the dumped game to other people. However, companies are also free to implement measures (DRM) to stop you from doing that as much as possible, likely because they know more people would illegally distribute them if they didn’t.
Can’t wait until our courts decide that, due to the prevalence of “remasters” that are just upscaled ROMs running on emulators, that this is no longer considered “fair use.”
Fair use has nothing to do with this. Fair use has to do with distributing a copyrighted work. Emulators are (ideally) running completely original code that isn’t copied from the company’s source code. This is why, for example, PCSX2 has you use “your own” PS2 BIOS instead of including it.
The PS2 BIOS is copyrighted, so it’s illegal to distribute it (and it’s never been “fair use” to distribute it). But it’s not illegal to do whatever you want with it (including dump it) as long as you own the console you’re dumping it from and as long as you don’t upload it to the internet for the purpose of distributing it to others. As far as the law is concerned, you bought the console and can do to it whatever you wish, provided you keep it to yourself and don’t distribute it to others.
Games fall under the same category. You’re free to dump your games and play them however you wish, provided you don’t distribute the dumped game to other people. However, companies are also free to implement measures (DRM) to stop you from doing that as much as possible, likely because they know more people would illegally distribute them if they didn’t.