Comment by Wowfunhappy 9 hours ago
> I hope it won't get slaughtered by Roblox's legal team.
I'm not saying Roblox won't try, but this project strikes me as very obviously legal.
If legality was a spectrum, I'd rank this higher than VLC Media Player (patents) and way above an NES emulator. I suppose it'd be below Android, and Oracle did sue over Android.
(Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, etc.)
I don’t know of any country where emulation is illegal? Do you?
As the GP pointed out, OEMs use copyright and encryption to protect against unapproved execution. But that doesn’t apply to all systems.
Given countries like the UK and US have the strictest intellectual property and computer misuse laws, and emulation is legal there (bar the aforementioned caveats), I’d be surprised if there was a jurisdiction where emulation was illegal. However if you do know of somewhere then please do share.
To my knowledge emulation is illegal in Japan, as is modding consoles.
Edit: I looked into it a bit more. As it is against the law to dump ROMs from games you have legally purchased, as well as acquiring them through other channels, there is no way to emulate games in Japan in a legal manner.
Two factors are at play.
This looks like it just reimplements a few Roblox APIs in an open source engine. It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator or something.
Second, your poking a multi billion dollar bear. If this project ever takes off Roblox will take action, right or wrong that's enough to stop most small projects. You can be right, but you don't have millions to fight non stop lawsuits.
In reality this is a cute proof of concept. It's never going to compete with the actual product. If it does Roblox will have it stopped in 72 hours
> It would of probably made more sense to just create a Roblox to Godot translator
Its meant to be running live so you can play the many dynamic roblox games, I guess you could but it would be a mess.
pokemon showdown is insanely and I mean insanely successful but it seems to have been almost blessed by the pokemon company.
I genuinely don't know how its legal, when I shared the link to pokemon showdown to one of my friends, his first thoughts was, wait how is this legal? This is such a good thing, I wonder why this is free. Only for me to tell it its open source and bro was flabbergasted to say the least.
In practice, no society has ever overcome “might makes right.” Or, arguably, ever will.
The good news though; it’s lawyers shutting down your project. Yesterday, it was hiring someone to break your knees.
Curious what makes you say it'd be less legally dubious than an emulator? To me, it seems this would be at the same legality as the NES emulator because you're basically 'emulating' the environment Roblox game code runs in. To be fair if that intuition's correct it'd still be legal like emulators are if they're careful.
(also not a lawyer)
So long as the specific code used to implement a method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or specification of any methods used in the Java API. It does not matter that the declaration or method header lines are identical.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America...
The NES itself contains no code. Any NES emulator that ships with no software, or software under proper license (such as homebrew) is unambiguously legal. Does your PC, and the OS that drives it, suddenly become inherently illegal if you, as a user, installed pirated software? No, of course not.
VLC is French, so the US law on software patents doesn't apply to it.
The supreme court ruled against oracle that an API cannot be copyrighted, but Roblox can still ban you for using an unofficial client (like discord does)
Emulators are unambiguously legal as long as the emulator author doesn't distribute copyrighted software without permission, and as long as no encryption is involved (recent action by Nintendo have made that bit a little unclear).