Nintendo downloaded Super Mario Bros from the internet and sold it to you.
Haha! That says it all. To explain for whoever didn't watch this, he discovered an iNES header on the Virtual Console version of SMB. The iNES header was developed in the 90s by the amateur emulation scene. So Nintendo just used tools developed by the crowd they've opposed legally, and regurgitated them on their consoles to make more money on these old games. Anyone still feel guilty for using Nesticle through Nestopia?
Edit:
An emulator is just a video codec for playing games.
OR
A video codec is nothing but a filmstrip emulator.
Great analogy. Movies can be preserved digitally and re-released on anything because of the standards in place, none of which are contentious. Games should be preservable and redistributable in the same way. But emulation is contentious, apparently even more than I realized--because even using it to run games commercially, legitimately brings sticky legal issues.
Edit 2: MAME/MESS to the rescue? He seems to think so. Didn't elaborate too much here though, as it ended rather abruptly after that. But he sticks with the idea of a universal "codec" for old games pretty well, with the notion of making these classics redistributable everywhere with the same ease as old movies. Interesting. Hope it leads to something.
