Game Emulation Legality

"I want to play pirated games" is a perfectly legitimate reason

How can it be piracy if I own the game I'm emulating?

It's legal if the recipient owns the game, it would be covered under fair use for compatibility purposes.

Aren't game ROMs illegal to distribute? How legal is this?

Doesn't IA have an explicit copyright exemption for some purposes? See: their playable copies of some games.

This is not academic: https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/video-game-preservation...These are old games, they can't be purchased anywhere, they aren't taking anyone's precious profits, and they still can't be (legally) played.This is one case at least where "piracy" is definitively not theft.

Owning a game doesn't make it legal to pirate it

Yeah, you might as well pirate it, that's just as bad in their view.Same with ripping DVDs/Blu-rays, it's illegal to rip them anyway, so might as well just download them.Especially now that they're suing emulator developers, it's almost unethical to buy Switch games anymore.

The IA actually has a DMCA exemption for the pirated games: https://archive.org/about/dmca.php

Games often use licensed third party assets like copyrighted music or various SW libraries for graphics or networking. That copyrighted content is licensed to them for a fixed number of years.After that license period expires, they're no longer allowed to sell the game, unless they negociate again a new license agreement with whoever owns that IP now, which is often too much of a headache, and if they do renew it, it means a new release of the game for extra money to offset the new licen