Its ambivalent, for sure - but it also depends to what abstraction level you want to rise.
The concept of intellectual copyright that "dies when Mickey Mouse dies" (= becomes public domain) is a relatively young one. Well lobbied - but young.
The original intent might even have derived from the notion that an artists work should pay for his families well being, after an unexpected death. If you tell that to one of the 300 factory workers, that makes games nowadays, in an industry whose products often have to achieve 80% of their lifetime sales within' the first two weeks (actuality kills
), he will sneer at you...
Remakes, rereleases and compilations (picked by a marketing team) aside, emulation imho should be considered ethical. In fact "how" the scene operates, is the only logical conclusion for one of the first "media" products that was digital (= zero cost copyable) to begin with. We could argue the time frame until ethical use, but in an age where no 2600 game could ever be considered remotely viable as competition to current age games, even 20 years seems like a stretch. In that timespan four of five companies producing those games probably faltered..
As far as piracy on current systems is concerned, this lies somewhere in between "large scale organized crime" ("special kind of ethics.."
) and serving a need for a population with a low disposable income. Some of it is market making, some of it is free advertising, some of it was paving the way for the future ("downloadable games").. some of it are outright lost sales. This one is harder to argue..
The thing is, I'd love to take the high ground here as well, but I owned an Xecuter (now under new management
) chipped Xbox v1 as well, back in the days - and therefore used concepts like "console based emulation" and "open source media centers" maybe 10 years before the rest of the world, so looking at where we currently are (Nintendo eShop Emulation, VF5 and Outrun emulated as part of Yakuza 6, Netflix on every TV), its hard to internalize, that all those concepts where definitely bad - because some people might not have looked too closely who provided them their roms.
You could even go more meta and say, that because of the "copy freely" culture in silicon valley - the productivity of the US economy grew so fast, that they where able to win the cold war, by funneling large sums of the newly generated money into the war economy, forcing russia into an arms race they couldnt win. (Not something I think about every day - but I just watched an ARTE (left wing intelligencia TV network in europe) documentary, that indicated just that.
Or that "IP theft" was legally sanctioned by less affluent nations to try to close the technology gap, that was suddenly created, as well as by silicon valley joints, that wanted to get their foot into the door into a developing market (the Google / Oracle lawsuit just went into the next round..
).
Or look at what facebook does. They practically steal your personal data to sell it to their advertising partners...
It all depends on where you draw the lines..
(Intentionally unenforcable laws, so "general in private behavior" cant be criminalized, if it doesnt fall above the "criminal law" threshhold, because otherwise our law systems would not be upholdable ("too many cases..").
Ethics start, where morals end..
