Nintendo Lawyer Discusses Game Piracy And Emulation Lawsuit Strategy

Nishiura outlined Nintendo's stance in his lecture, given to industry members at the Tokyo eSports Festa hosted by Japan's Association of Copyright for Computer Software (ACCS), an agency roughly analogous to the American Entertainment Software Association. Speaking on behalf of Nintendo, Nishiura recounted tales of the gaming giant's successes in protecting its copyrights, including the dismantling of both of the most popular Nintendo Switch emulator projects last year.
In so doing, the attorney laid out Big N's specific stance on emulators. It's a bit more nuanced than you might expect, as while they don't have the protected status that they do in the United States, emulators are not strictly illegal, even in Japan. Nishiura explains that emulators can however become illegal depending on how they are used. According to Nintendo, when an emulator directly reproduces a program that is part of the game device it is emulating, it is copyright infringement. This is why most emulators rely heavily on reverse engineering and require users to produce their own copies of system firmware.
While Nishiura didn't say this, a cynic might point out that Nintendo's aggressive assault on Switch emulators could be an effort to protect its bottom line specifically with regard to the Nintendo Switch's successor. The company has confirmed that the next-generation machine will be compatible in some fashion with extant Switch software, and it's easy to make the mental leap from "new machine plays old software" to "prevent old software from being played elsewhere."
We obviously weren't present at the Tokyo eSports Festa, so we have to go off of second-hand information gleaned from reporting like that of DenFamiNicoGamer's, but it's interesting to see Nintendo so explicitly define what makes an emulator illegal rather than allowing the public to believe that emulators simply are illegal. In fact, Nishiura specifically explains that emulators are not by their nature illegal—refreshing honesty from a company that is sometimes regarded as user-hostile by the community.