NES IPhone Emulator Gets Pulled From App Store
With pirating on the rise it is hard for me to talk to anyone tech savvy who hasn't dabbled with some form of homebrew gaming. This week the emulator Nescaline appeared on iTunes for 6.99. This type of app rarely survives in the Apple store (the ancient Commadore 64 emulator being a notable exception) as the company tends to not embrace potential copyright liability. Nescaline, which has since been pulled from the store, is equipped with a function that allow you to download NES roms from the internet. How this slipped past iTunes' tough approval process in the first place is beyond me. Jonathan Zdziarski, the creator of Nescaline and author of the notorious iPhone book, iPhone Forensics, even discusses his product's potential illegality in this disclaimer:
Nescaline works well with many freely available home-brew and public domain games, but is not guaranteed to work with all of them. Author does not condone the piracy of commercial games.
Mr. Zdziarski's statement seems somewhat self-serving: a wink at the audience, although what he says is true. When someone takes the time to make a game on any scale it costs money. Pirating undercuts the game maker's profit, making it that much harder for them to afford to continue making games. Sometimes, it is tough to balance consumer's rights with a corporation's right to defend their copyrights, and thus their livelihood.
I am sure this will not be the last time we see a product of such a dubious nature in the app store. But where do you draw the line when it comes to these types of programs? Maybe you exclusively use emulators for legal homebrew applications, or perhaps you feel engaging in a back-up copy of games actually purchased is not such a bad idea. Or are you of the camp that subscribes to the idea that all information should be free?
ROCsteady
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 2 January 2010
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: emulator, iphone, iphone forensics, jonathan zdziarski, nescaline, nintendo
It seems a bit stupid that ancient games like NES games are still under strict copyright. Only way to play them legally is buying them used and that won't bring any money to the original creators. Only a select few are brought to online stores.
Under the original US copyright law, most NES games would be falling into the public domain in the next year or two (most of the games I'm most interested in would already be there), current corporate-lobbyist-designed infinite monopolies notwithstanding. Regardless, I don't think anyone can seriously argue that any of their creators are being deprived of revenue except possibly for those few dozen whose games are available through the Wii Virtual Console.
That said, anyone wanting to run emulators on their iPhone has presumably jailbroken it ages ago. Doesn't seem like it would control especially well to me, though.
Even if there were some magical control that only allowed the emulator to download public domain homebrew games, the app still violates the terms of the iPhone SDK. This is the same reason there's no Flash app, and the reason the Frotz app was initially pulled. You cannot download & run interpreted / executable code.
Frotz was rereleased as a version that bundled games with the app, which is the only real way around the restriction. This emulator could go the same route, in theory, but I doubt it will.