Video game emulation and the law: anatomy of a paradox

In March 2024, Yuzu, the world’s most popular Nintendo Switch emulator, downloaded more than a million times, disappeared overnight. A few months later, Ryujinx, its main competitor, shut down in turn. Citra, for the 3DS, had been swept away in the same storm. Within a few months, Nintendo had carried out what looks like a legal clean-up operation of rare efficiency, almost without ever going to court.

Let us first define the subject. An emulator, as software, is a program that aims to simulate the behaviour of a hardware platform on a third-party device. In principle, it contains no code belonging to the original manufacturer: it merely imitates how it works. According to Professor Geoffray Brunaux, an emulator makes it possible “to reproduce the behaviour of a console or computer on another machine so that the games originally designed for the emulated console or computer can be run on it”¹. Hardware emulation, through the physical reconfiguration of chips, does exist, but it remains marginal and will not be covered here.

This technique makes it possible to give old games a second life, to preserve the retro gaming market or to build backward-compatible machines, satisfying players’ nostalgia.

Today, a few clicks are enough to access a multitude of emulation sites, such as Web-emulation, Planetemu or Mondemul, which offer video games without the publishers’ consent. Yet at the same time, Apple was opening its App Store to emulators, and hundreds of projects, such as Dolphin, PCSX2 or RetroArch, continued their development without any court ever having condemned them.

This brings back to the table a question: is emulation legal? The answer, as often in law, is both yes and no, and it is precisely this ambiguity that today shapes publishers’ entire litigation strategy.

Answering it requires distinguishing two stages. First, the design of the emulator, which can remain lawful depending on the technique used (I); then its use, almost always tainted by unlawfulness (II).

I. Designing an emulator: possible lawfulness

Under what conditions does building an emulator escape infringement? Answering this requires recalling the protection regime for software (A), then the prerogatives the law grants users without the author’s consent (B), before confronting this framework with concrete design techniques (C) and, more specifically, with the fate of decompilation (D).

A. The protection of software

To work, any machine, whether a computer, a console or a mobile device, must run software, that is, sets of instructions written in a programming language. These instructions take two forms: source code, intelligible to humans, and object code (or binary code), the same instructions translated into a sequence of bits, the only form intelligible to the machine. Developers write the expected behaviour in source code; then comes compilation, which translates it into an executable program in binary format.

Several texts protect software as a work of the mind, covering both source code and object code, provided it is original and materialised. Preparatory design work (plans, mock-ups, etc.) can also be protected.

Their authors enjoy exclusive rights, based in particular on Articles L. 111-1 and L. 112-2 of the French Intellectual Property Code (CPI), which enshrine the protection of software as works of the mind, on Article 10.1 of the TRIPS Agreement, which treats computer programs as literary works within the meaning of the Berne Convention, and on Directive 2009/24/EC of 23 April 2009 (codifying the former Directive 91/250/EEC, known as the “Software Directive”), which harmonises their protection within the Union.

Software may also be patentable where it forms part of a broader technical invention, bearing in mind that software “as such” is excluded from patentability (Art. L. 611-10, 2°, c) CPI).

Its functionality, on the other hand, cannot be protected (CJEU, 2 May 2012, SAS Institute v. World Programming, C-406/10).

It follows from this regime that only the rights holders can authorise the use, reproduction, running, translation, adaptation or placing on the market of the software, the exhaustive list of these prerogatives appearing in Article L. 122-6 CPI.

B. Prerogatives granted to users without the authors’ consent

The author’s monopoly is however subject to several narrowly interpreted exceptions provided for by the CPI:

• Acts necessary for normal use (Art. L. 122-6-1, I): reproduction and performance do not require authorisation where they are necessary for the use of the software in accordance with its intended purpose. Limited to these acts alone, the exception does not cover improvements, adaptations or additions, which go beyond normal use and require the author’s consent.
• The backup copy (Art. L. 122-6-1, II): the user may make a copy necessary to preserve the use of the software. A derogation from the private copying regime (Art. L. 122-5), it is strictly regulated: a single copy, reserved for the lawful user, made from a lawful source, in order to preserve the use of the software (Cass. com., 22 May 1991).
• Studying how it works (Art. L. 122-6-1, III): the user may observe, study or test the software in order to determine the unprotected ideas and principles behind it, without accessing the source code. In this sense, the CJEU allows the functionality to be reproduced in a second program as long as there has been no access to the source code (SAS Institute, cited above).
• Decompilation for interoperability purposes (Art. L. 122-6-1, IV): a reverse engineering process, decompilation is the reverse of compilation, consisting in reconstructing source code from object code. Interoperability refers to the ability of a program to communicate with other programs; the French Court of Cassation has, for example, linked data migration operations to it (Cass. 1re civ., 20 Oct. 2011, No. 10-14069). Decompilation for this purpose is subject to cumulative conditions that we will examine.
• Decompilation to correct errors (also linked to Art. L. 122-6-1, I): the CJEU added to this framework in Top System (6 Oct. 2021, C-13/20), ruling that Article 5 of Directive 91/250 allows any lawful acquirer to decompile a program in order to fix its bugs, without having to meet the stricter conditions of the interoperability exception. This exception, which unlike the previous ones is not mandatory, may be adjusted by contract in favour of authors who prefer to correct their software themselves. French courts have extended this pragmatic logic, going as far as compelling a publisher to hand over the source code to its licensee so that it could carry out maintenance itself (Douai Court of Appeal, 7 Apr. 2022, No. 20/01452; M. Sonnier-Poquillon, IEEPI, 2024).

C. The different techniques for designing an emulator

With the protection regime and its exceptions established, they still need to be confronted with the concrete processes through which an emulator is born. These fall into two broad families of methods, whose legality does not rest on the same ground. Any reverse engineering technique involves at least a temporary reproduction of the code, but only some involve its adaptation or translation: it is this dividing line that determines their regime.

The first family relies on observing and studying how the software works in order to identify its ideas and principles: behavioural reproduction, behavioural reverse engineering, and high-level emulation through empirical validation (HLE). These processes find their legal basis in Article L. 122-6-1, III as long as the object code is neither extracted nor translated into source code. The aim is to create software that imitates the behaviour of another without taking a single line of its code, but by taking its ideas and principles, which are not protectable. As long as the emulator reproduces no element of the original operating system, it does not risk being found infringing and is even, in turn, software eligible for copyright protection.

Some teams also use the clean room technique (or “Chinese wall”), which consists in recreating a functional BIOS (the software bridging hardware and operating system) without ever accessing the original source code: one team analyses the behaviour and writes specifications, while a second team, isolated from any contact with the code, reimplements it from those specifications alone. The long-gestating community BIOS project for PCSX2 is an illustration. Since copyright protects neither software architecture nor functionality, this family is not tainted by unlawfulness, subject only to action based on trade secrets or patents: software is not patentable as such (Art. L. 611-10 CPI), but can be as a component of a technical invention.

The second family is based on decompilation, and therefore on translating object code into source code (interpretation, static or dynamic recompilation, low-level emulation or LLE). It consists in extracting the machine’s operating system and adapting it to another device. This process is obviously lawful for the authors of the system themselves; for third parties, however, decompilation must meet several strict criteria that now need to be tested.

D. Is designing an emulator through decompilation legal?

We can immediately dismiss decompilation to correct errors: video game emulation has never been about fixing bugs. This justification cannot succeed. That leaves decompilation for interoperability purposes.

In Europe and in France, litigation on the legality of emulators built through decompilation is rare. Across the Atlantic, case law has extended interoperability to emulation: from Atari Games v. Nintendo (1992), which established the principle (Atari nevertheless lost for having obtained the source code unfairly), and then in Sega (1992) and Sony v. Connectix (2000), the courts accepted decompilation in the context of emulating a gaming device, where it was necessary to understand the target program and create one’s own software, in the name of fair use, which limits copyright. In Connectix, the American judge even described the emulator as a “modestly transformative” work, justifying the intermediate copying of the BIOS carried out during reverse engineering. The Bleem case is another emblematic example: this emulator, which ran certain PlayStation games on PC, including Namco’s fighting game Tekken 3, withstood Sony’s attempts to stop it being sold. These American solutions, however, only hold insofar as reverse engineering serves to reach unprotected elements: fair use, like the European interoperability exception, stops at the threshold of protected expression. The two systems thus converge in refusing to let decompilation become a vehicle for appropriating the original code.

What about French law? The American judge’s liberal reasoning has no equivalent here. Decompilation for interoperability purposes is not a principle, but a narrowly interpreted exception, confined by Article L. 122-6-1, IV within a double set of cumulative conditions: conditions prior to the act, then restrictions on the use of the information obtained. And at each of these conditions, the emulator stumbles. The demonstration deserves to be made point by point, as it shows that the exception, far from securing emulation, condemns almost all its concrete cases.

The act must be performed by a lawful user. Only a person who has acquired the software lawfully (a licensee) may decompile. The condition therefore requires the developer to have acquired the console’s BIOS properly, by buying the device and accepting the licence. In practice, firmware most often circulates as dumps retrieved online, outside any lawful acquisition: the first condition is already rarely met. In the linkers case, the Paris Court of Appeal (division 5, chamber 12, 26 Sept. 2011, Nintendo v. Divineo and others) specifically denied the defendants the status of lawful users, closing the door to the exception from the outset.

The information must not have been made available in another way. Decompilation is only tolerated as a last resort, when interoperability data is not available. The developer is therefore under a prior obligation: to request this information from the rights holder before any disassembly. In case of refusal, the lawful route is not unauthorised decompilation, but an application to Arcom (formerly Hadopi) under Article L. 331-32 CPI. In the Nintendo case, it was the absence of any prior request to the manufacturer that brought down the exception: you do not decompile before asking.

The act must be confined to the parts necessary for interoperability. The burden of proof here is formidable: it is up to the decompiler to show that they did not go beyond what was strictly necessary. At first instance, the defendants had in fact been given the benefit of the doubt, as Nintendo had not established that access to the code went beyond the indispensable parts; but the Court of Appeal reversed this analysis. An emulator, which must reproduce the entire behaviour of a system, can hardly claim to have confined itself to a few interfaces.

The information must not be communicated to third parties, unless necessary for interoperability. Yet emulators are almost always developed in open communities, on public repositories and shared discussion channels, where documents and reverse engineering results circulate freely. The collaborative model, which is the technical strength of these projects, legally destroys the confidentiality required by the text.

The information must not be used to produce software substantially similar in its expression, nor to infringe copyright. Here we touch the heart of the problem, and the decisive obstacle. The interoperability exception was designed to allow an independent program to communicate with another, not to reproduce it: as one legal scholar put it, interoperating means “speaking the same language” without making clones (M. Behar-Touchais). But the very purpose of an emulator is mimetic: it reproduces the behaviour, that is, the functional expression, of the emulated system. Even if all the prior conditions were met, this last requirement alone is enough to exclude emulation from the scope of the exception. The provision does not tolerate the result that an emulator pursues by its very nature.

A partial conclusion emerges. French case law, scant as it is, applies the exception with consistent rigour: the Paris Court of Appeal refused to see it as a shelter for decompiling console software, as it had already done for decompilation to study security (Paris Court of Appeal, 21 Feb. 2006) or for corrective maintenance (Caen Court of Appeal, 28 Oct. 2010). Conversely, the exception has applied where it served genuine interoperability: the Caen Court of Appeal ruled in 2015 that decompiling part of Skype, in order to develop interoperable secure messaging software, did not constitute infringement (Caen Court of Appeal, 18 March 2015). The dividing line is clear: interoperating means communicating with a program without reproducing it, which an emulator, mimetic by nature, cannot avoid. This line is being reinforced as a genuine “right to interoperability” takes shape (Directive 2009/24, the DMA, and now competition law: CJEU, 25 Feb. 2025, Google / Enel, C-233/23, which penalises refusal of interoperability as an abuse of a dominant position), a right that protects communication between independent systems, not the reproduction of one by the other. Legal scholars therefore agree that it is “unlikely” that emulators can fall within this exception. Emulation through extraction and decompilation, a slavish copy of software, is therefore prohibited. On the other hand, while not encouraged, emulation through observing and studying original software, which never touches the source code, presents no established legal risk: it is on this ground alone that the design of an emulator remains truly defensible.

II. Using an emulator: de facto unlawfulness

Lawfulness won at the design stage, however, says nothing about use. And this is where everything is decided: an emulator only comes to life at the cost of ancillary acts which, for their part, are rarely lawful. We must therefore examine the status of the game copies the tool requires (A), before dispelling the justifications commonly put forward to legitimise them (B).

A. Using ROMs and ISOs: infringing acts

While an emulator can rest on lawful foundations, its practical usefulness depends on a chain of acts that are most often questionable, or even openly unlawful. This is the fundamental paradox of emulation: a legal tool that only works at the cost of ancillary illegal acts.

Almost all modern emulators, such as PCSX2 (PS2), DuckStation (PSX), Yuzu and Ryujinx (Switch), require copies of the games: ROMs (from Read Only Memory, for cartridges) and ISOs (from the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 9660 standard, for discs).

These computer files containing video games in digital form are, legally, reproductions of video game works. While their use by rights holders or licensees poses no problem, it is a different matter when unauthorised persons use them.

Since the video game is a complex work subject to distributive classification (Cass. 1re civ., 25 June 2009, Cryo), this unauthorised reproduction harms both its software component, governed by the software author’s own rights (Art. L. 122-6 CPI), and its graphic and sound elements, which fall under the right of reproduction (fixation on a medium, Art. L. 122-3 CPI) and the right of performance (communication to the public, Art. L. 122-2 CPI). At European level, the CJEU confirmed this composite nature: a video game is “complex matter” whose program and graphic and sound elements, where they contribute to the originality of the work, are protected together by copyright (Nintendo v. PC Box, 23 Jan. 2014, C-355/12, following Infopaq, 16 July 2009, C-5/09).

Carried out without the rights holders’ authorisation, extracting these files from a console (the dump), distributing them on the internet and, a fortiori, downloading them all infringe these prerogatives, as well as the right to place on the market specific to software, which the author alone has the power to authorise (Art. L. 122-6 CPI).

ROM download sites, despite their cultural normalisation, operate in clearly established illegality, constituting the offence of infringement (Art. L. 335-2 and L. 335-3 CPI). The American courts confirmed this by penalising the platforms LoveROMs and LoveRETRO (Nintendo of America Inc. v. Mathias, No. 2:18-cv-02282, D. Ariz. 2018) and then RomUniverse (Nintendo of America Inc. v. Storman, No. 2:19-cv-07818-CBM-RAO, C.D. Cal. 2021), whose operator was found liable for infringing both the publisher’s copyright and its trademarks.

Today, most ROMs and ISOs survive only thanks to the tolerance of certain publishers or as abandonware, a term referring to games whose exploitation has ended or whose rights holders no longer exist.

B. The myth of the private copy and the backup copy

To legitimise such practices, a widespread idea has taken root in gaming culture: that it is lawful to download a ROM, either under the private copying exception (Art. L. 122-5, 2° CPI), “copies or reproductions made from a lawful source and strictly reserved for the private use of the copier”, or under the backup copy exception (Art. L. 122-6-1, II CPI), “the person entitled to use the software may make a backup copy where it is necessary to preserve the use of the software”.

For software, the legislature made the backup copy exception a lex specialis, the “special law” that displaces private copying: the latter covers all works except software. The software component of the game is therefore, in principle, outside the scope of private copying. And even if one tried to invoke this exception for the audiovisual elements of the game alone, it could not, in any event, succeed.

On private copying. The lawfulness of these copies is questionable on three counts:

• The lawful source: a requirement added by the law of 20 December 2011. The copy must come from a lawfully acquired original, physical or digital. Yet in the vast majority of cases, the copy itself comes from an infringing copy, as already noted, involving numerous infringements of the authors’ exclusive rights.
• Personal extraction: the copier must dump the copy themselves from the copy they own, for their sole and personal use. Downloading a copy made by someone else, which is what distribution on the internet involves, falls outside the exception: it is importing an infringing copy on the downloader’s side, and infringing making available on the host’s side.
• Private use: the copy may not be used collectively and can, at most, be shared within the family circle. Yet ROMs and ISOs are made available to the public and multiply with each download: the copy is therefore not reserved for the private use required by the text. Putting them online also amounts to distributing the work, in direct contradiction with the condition of strictly private use.

On the backup copy. Here again, ROMs and ISOs fail to meet the criteria: these copies are neither unique, given how they are distributed (Paris Court of Appeal, 20 Oct. 1988), nor necessary to preserve the use of the software, as required by Article L. 122-6-1, II CPI. Across the Atlantic, the federal court for the Northern District of Illinois had already ruled in 1983 on the Prom Blaster, a device that duplicated Atari 2600 cartridges: a backup copy is only tolerated to guard against mechanical or electrical failure of the original, so copies going beyond this purpose justified an injunction to stop sales (Atari, Inc. v. JS&A Group, Inc.).

On circumventing technological protection measures (TPMs). In reality, the exact legal nature of these files matters little. Suppose that making a “personal dump” (extracting the data from one’s own cartridge for strictly private use) met, in theory, the criteria for private copying or a backup copy, requiring a legal source and the copier and user being the same person. In practice, for recent systems, benefiting from this legality proves virtually impossible.

The reason is simple. Today’s gaming machines rely on closed ecosystems and systematically include protection devices. These devices, commonly known as DRM (Digital Rights Management) or TPMs (technological protection measures), are defined in Article L. 331-5 CPI, which transposes Directive 2001/29/EC of 22 May 2001: they are techniques designed to prevent or restrict uses not authorised by rights holders, a measure being deemed effective where it allows the use of the protected work to be controlled. Consequently, to launch ROMs, ISOs or even personal backups directly on the original hardware, the player is forced to circumvent these barriers using hacking interfaces, such as linkers.

Looking at case law, notably a landmark decision of the Paris Court of Appeal of 26 September 2011, the technology at work in these adapters is not fundamentally prohibited, provided it does not infringe the manufacturers’ patents. Nevertheless, the judges clearly ruled that these tools must under no circumstances be used to defeat hardware or software security. Yet the very principle on which these linkers work is the illegal simulation of authentication protocols normally reserved for official cartridges.

Legally, breaking these TPMs is an offence formally penalised by the French Intellectual Property Code (Art. L. 331-5 and L. 335-3-1). These provisions firmly condemn supplying or designing tools developed to neutralise an effective technological measure. The only nuance to this strict prohibition comes from the proportionality review required by European case law (CJEU, Nintendo v. PC Box, cited above), which asks the judge to check that no less restrictive solution could have protected the creators’ interests just as effectively.

Ultimately, resorting to these circumvention devices completely rules out the application of the copyright exceptions. French law thus traps the good-faith user in a genuine dead end: they have a theoretical right to a private copy that they cannot physically exercise without slipping into illegality. This is the main reason why home emulation is overwhelmingly concentrated on retro gaming, a field in which old machines largely lacked these complex digital locks.

Conclusion

At the end of this journey, the initial paradox resolves into a simple distinction: between the tool and its use. The emulator itself can be perfectly lawful. Designed by observing and studying a system’s behaviour, without taking its code, it is just one original piece of software among others, itself eligible for copyright protection; it is only through decompilation that it tips into unlawfulness, since the interoperability exception can almost never shelter it. Its use, on the other hand, is almost always unlawful, because the emulator only works at the cost of infringing ROMs and ISOs and, on recent machines, of circumventing technical protections. The same technique therefore changes status not according to its nature, but according to what is done with it.

This framework sheds light on a blind spot in the debate: emulation is not systematically unlawful, and it even becomes fully legal when practised by the rights holders themselves (G. Brunaux, Le droit du jeu vidéo, Mare & Martin, 2026). Sega, for example, included in the world of Shenmue, on Dreamcast, a virtual arcade cabinet on which players could replay its old hits After Burner or Hang-On. Taking advantage of the retro gaming revival, Nintendo offered old digital titles on its Wii and Wii U consoles at sometimes negligible prices, such as Super Metroid, downloadable for thirty euro cents, and even games from third-party publishers such as SNK or Sega which, no longer making consoles, found a way to monetise their catalogue. Microsoft installed an Xbox 360 emulator in the Xbox One through a simple update, and Sony made its PlayStation 4 compatible with emulated PlayStation 2 games, sold on the PlayStation Store. All these forms are lawful because they are implemented by the rights holders, or with their consent: it is not the emulator that is at issue, but the hand that holds it.

This official emulation nevertheless remains a minority. Most ROMs and ISOs are still supplied by third-party sites, without authorisation, and survive only through the tolerance of rights holders. The harm is minimal for abandonware, games that are no longer exploited or whose rights holders have disappeared, and publishers may even find emulation useful, unlawful though it may be, when it keeps their old productions attractive and draws in a new audience. But this tolerance is not a right, and manufacturers’ growing interest in emulation built into their own machines could bring it to an end: Nintendo has already obtained the closure of several emulators and platforms, as illustrated by the disappearance of Yuzu, Ryujinx and Citra.

That still requires having the means. For in practice, fighting emulation and emulated games proves formidably difficult. Emulators are often free and open-source software, duplicated and archived endlessly on repositories spread across the world; ROMs and ISOs circulate on a myriad of mirror sites, hosted in accommodating jurisdictions and rebuilt as soon as they are closed. Shutting down an emulator like Yuzu does not make its code disappear, since it has already been cloned thousands of times, and the community-based, international and decentralised nature of these practices largely escapes infringement actions brought publisher by publisher, site by site. Nintendo’s strategy confirms this a contrario: unable to eradicate the phenomenon, the publisher targets the most exposed links and relies on deterrence, without ever drying up the source.

This finding leads to a fundamental issue, largely absent from public debate in France. The architecture of copyright, designed to protect the individual work and its commercial exploitation, is ill-suited to a medium whose access depends on a technical platform: when the console is no longer produced, the servers shut down or the publisher disappears, the work becomes legally inaccessible even though it remains physically preserved. The result is that a considerable part of video game heritage is legally inaccessible. The Video Game History Foundation established in 2023 that 87% of American games released before 2010 are commercially unavailable, leaving no route of access other than emulation and ROMs, in other words illegality. The paradox is striking in France, where legal deposit at the BnF has, since 1992, built up a considerable heritage collection, but one that can only be consulted on site: the State preserves works to which the public has, in practice, almost no access.

This is the whole meaning of the Yuzu litigation, which marks a break that is less legal than strategic: Nintendo obtained no ruling of principle against emulation, but showed that it could dismantle a mature software ecosystem in a few months, at moderate cost and with no risk of setting precedent. As long as the French or European legislature does not take up the heritage question that these private strategies leave unresolved, most of video game history will remain legally out of reach, and will continue to survive, on the margins, thanks to emulation alone.

Sources

Legislation

• French Intellectual Property Code: Art. L. 111-1, L. 112-2, L. 122-2, L. 122-3, L. 122-4, L. 122-5 (2°), L. 122-6, L. 122-6-1 (I to IV), L. 331-5, L. 331-32, L. 335-2, L. 335-3, L. 335-3-1, L. 611-10
• Directive 2009/24/EC of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs (codifying Directive 91/250/EEC)
• Directive 2001/29/EC of 22 May 2001 on copyright in the information society (InfoSoc)
• TRIPS Agreement, Art. 10.1; Berne Convention; European Patent Convention, Art. 52(2)

Case law

France

• Paris Court of Appeal, 20 Oct. 1988, JCP G 1989, II, 21188, note X. Linant de Bellefonds
• Cass. com., 22 May 1991
• Paris Court of Appeal, 21 Feb. 2006 (decompilation to study security)
• Cass. 1re civ., 25 June 2009, Cryo (distributive classification of video games)
• Caen Court of Appeal, 28 Oct. 2010 (corrective maintenance)
• Cass. 1re civ., 20 Oct. 2011, No. 10-14069 (decompilation and interoperability)
• Paris Court of Appeal, division 5, chamber 12, 26 Sept. 2011, Nintendo v. Divineo, Absolute Games, FL Games, Aakro Pure Tronic and others (linkers)
• Caen Court of Appeal, 18 March 2015, Skype (decompilation for interoperability purposes)
• Douai Court of Appeal, 1st chamber, 7 Apr. 2022, No. 20/01452 (handing over source code for maintenance)

European Union

• CJEU, 16 July 2009, Infopaq International, C-5/09
• CJEU, 22 Dec. 2010, Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace (BSA), C-393/09 (protection of source code and object code)
• CJEU, 2 May 2012, SAS Institute v. World Programming, C-406/10
• CJEU, 23 Jan. 2014, Nintendo v. PC Box, C-355/12
• CJEU, 6 Oct. 2021, Top System, C-13/20
• CJEU, 25 Feb. 2025, Google / Enel X Italia, C-233/23 (interoperability and abuse of a dominant position)

United States

• Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo (Fed. Cir. 1992); Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510 (9th Cir. 1992)
• Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp. (9th Cir. 2000); Sony Computer Entertainment v. Bleem (9th Cir. 2000)
• Atari, Inc. v. JS&A Group, Inc., 597 F. Supp. 5 (N.D. Ill. 1983) (Prom Blaster)
• Nintendo of America Inc. v. Mathias, No. 2:18-cv-02282 (D. Ariz. 2018) (LoveROMs / LoveRETRO)
• Nintendo of America Inc. v. Storman, No. 2:19-cv-07818-CBM-RAO (C.D. Cal. 2021) (RomUniverse)

Legal scholarship

• N. Binctin, Droit de la propriété intellectuelle : droit d’auteur, brevet, droits voisins, marque, dessins et modèles, LGDJ, coll. « Manuel », 8th ed., 2024
• G. Brunaux, Le jeu vidéo, un objet juridique identifié, Mare & Martin, 2019
• G. Brunaux, Le droit du jeu vidéo, Mare & Martin, 2026
• P. Mouron and G. Rabu, Droit du jeu vidéo, Larcier-Intersentia, coll. « Droit des technologies », 2025
• A. Chéron, « Technique et légalité des émulateurs de jeux vidéo », afjv.com, 1 Feb. 2016
• B. Warusfel and M. Dhenne, « La propriété intellectuelle face à l’ingénierie inverse », Propriétés intellectuelles, 2016, No. 58, pp. 20-32
• M. Behar-Touchais, « Être interopérable ou ne pas l’être », CCE 2008, study No. 6
• L. Fouquet, « Jeux vidéo : protection par le droit d’auteur et contournement des mesures techniques de protection », note on CJEU, 23 Jan. 2014, C-355/12, Nomos, 20 March 2014
• P.-Y. Margnoux and H. Roy, « Décompilation d’un logiciel : état des lieux », Le Monde du Droit, 28 July 2015
• C. Weber and J.-C. Ienné, « Vers un droit à l’interopérabilité ? », ITLAW Avocats, 12 March 2025
• S. Dusollier, « L’arrêt Nintendo : la protection des mesures techniques au pays des jeux vidéo », Auteurs & Média, 2014, No. 5, pp. 360-369
• G. Mathias, « Décompilation et analyse de logiciel », Solutions Numériques, No. 15, 20 March 2017
• M. Sonnier-Poquillon, « Le droit de l’utilisateur légitime de corriger un logiciel : mythe ou réalité ? », IEEPI, Paroles d’experts, 2024
• M. Soulez, « La décompilation d’un logiciel pour corriger des erreurs », Lexing Avocats, 7 Jan. 2022
• É. Wery, « À quelles conditions décompiler un logiciel ? », Droit & Technologies, 6 Dec. 2021
• G. Leclerc, « Droit des logiciels et des bases de données : le guide complet », Victoris Avocat, 22 Feb. 2026

Online resources

• « Droits des ROMs pour les bornes d’arcade », Les Fabriques du Ponant (wiki), translating the interview with D. E. Bambauer (Univ. of Arizona), “Is Downloading Retro Video Game ROMs Ever Legal?”, HowToGeek
• « L’émulation dans le rétrogaming : un safari juridique au cœur de la nostalgie », La Rétrogamerie, 2024
• N. Le Guennec, « Analyse comparative des règles de décompilation de logiciels en Europe (France, Allemagne) et aux États-Unis », teaching blogs of Université Paris Nanterre, 5 July 2019
• M. Kamal and X. Vogel, “The Legality and Morality of Video Game Emulation” (research-in-progress), SAIS 2020 Proceedings, No. 14, Southern Association for Information Systems Conference, 2020
• INPI, « Cas particulier : les logiciels », inpi.fr
• APP (Agence pour la Protection des Programmes), « Contenu de la protection du logiciel », knowledge base, app.asso.fr

Notes

1. G. Brunaux, Le jeu vidéo, un objet juridique identifié, Mare & Martin, 2019. ↩

Moez RAISCo-founder, publication director and lawyer in intellectual property and digital law

https://lexludica.com/en/articles/video-game-emulation-and-the-law