Law26 Jun 2026
Case law › United States
Sony v. Connectix
U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Cir., 10 February 2000, 203 F.3d 596
Studying a console's BIOS to develop an emulator can be fair use.
- Court
- U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Cir.
- Date
- 10 February 2000
- Reference
- 203 F.3d 596
- Parties
- Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp.
Key takeaways
Connectix had developed an emulator that ran PlayStation games on a computer. To build it, its developers had studied the console's BIOS, which meant making copies of it. Sony sued.
The court of appeals held that these intermediate copies were covered by fair use: they served only to understand the console's functional elements, and the final emulator did not contain Sony's code. It even described the emulator as a “modestly transformative” work. The ruling remains the go-to reference for advocates of emulation, but it has no equivalent in French law, which is much stricter.
The market analysis is the most quoted passage. For the court, Connectix's emulator is a legitimate competitor in the market for machines able to play PlayStation games. Sony was seeking to control that market, which copyright does not allow: its monopoly covers its code, not the function that code performs. The trade mark claim was also rejected.
The epilogue is less glorious for emulation: Sony ended up buying the software and withdrew it from the market. Under French and EU law, the copies of the BIOS made during the study could only be justified by the decompilation exception, whose conditions are rarely met for an emulator.
