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Notes -
Follow up to my question from last week looking for an emulator, I purchased a Miyoo Mini Plus. It runs games up to GBA and PS1, has a fun nostalgic form factor, and came pre-loaded with a ridiculous over-large quantity of games. I bought it primarily because I did, in fact, own a gameboy pocket and it got good reviews. While I've used emulators on my computer and tablet in the past, I valued the physical buttons and having a purpose built item for it, and getting everything in a plug-and-play package rather than needing to hunt them down online and load them on a device was nice. I'm sure I could have dug around and gotten the whole thing cheaper with a little more work, but I valued the simplicity and ease.
My question: how is it that something like this is sold openly on Amazon, with hundreds (they claim over 1000, but obviously I haven't tried more than a dozen yet) of copyrighted games on it? Why is it that Emulators and ROMs have always been so easy to find online, where music and movies and even books have always been hit or miss, subject to constant DMCA wars online?
It seems to me like an MP3 player being sold on Amazon with thousands of 90s-2000s top-40 songs pre-loaded would be taken down in days, as would a thumb drive loaded with every Oscar winner from the 90s or even a flash disk loaded with 2000s best-sellers, but the Mini Plus is sold for a reasonable price and shipped in two days. It's not like Nintendo has stopped marketing Pokemon or Yoshi, they've even occasionally marketed their own retro devices!
I've been playing around with it for a day or so, and it's pretty fun, works well, easy to use interface. Plays gameboy advance games pretty perfectly, PS1 games it performs well enough but the screen size makes it somewhat difficult for some games that were built for a TV. I've never been a serious gamer, the latest console I own is a PS2 I received for Christmas when it was the new thing. The typical amount of vidya I play in a week is zero, but every now and then I get an urge and want to play a video game, and wanted something handheld I could play while my wife watches TV, that kind of thing. I anticipate playing through Pokemon Fire Red and Sapphire, plinking around in DOOM, playing Yoshi's island.
And clearly if in my limited gaming time I'm playing Fire Red or Twisted Metal 4 on my Mini Plus I'm not going to be buying whatever version of those games they're on now. It's not going to have value for me, really, over the free version. So how is it not seen, at the very least, as competition?
Eventually, some of these products do get smacked down: there's actually a pretty big snafu right now over the explosion over the Yuzu emulator, and ROM sites as wackamole has been pretty constant.
((There's also a little bit of squish in US laws, in the archive exception, though I doubt it plays a particularly big role. Semiconductors don't have similar protections, and there's some spaces where it's hard to avoid -violating clones.))
But you're right that a surprising amount don't. This video is from 2021, and you can still buy both of them: a few Amazon store pages have closed, but even then it's hard to tell whether they've been closed-by-horse's-head or just had a vendor swap for some tots-legitimate-better-reviews, or even more esoteric reasons. Wouldn't recommend it, though, given how much better stuff is available since.
Which is the Charybdis for a serious legal threat. These companies aren't irreplaceable: the vast majority are -- at best -- circuit board designers and integrators, polishing a bit of UI on open-source or mixed-source code that does the heavy lifting. That's not a minor skill, especially at bulk production and dealing with decoupling capacitors, but ultimately it's a maybe a couple weeks of time for this sort of device, and perhaps more importantly there's new ones coming out every month. At best, killing one simply means buyers have to jump into the scary void of low-trust purchasing, except even the big-name vendors here often have occasional goofs.
The Scylla is that almost all of the immediate vendors aren't even those designers and integrators: most are warehouses, drop-shippers, cut-outs, often for manufacturers that are in countries with more laissez-faire opinions of US copyright law. Sometimes they're intentionally shell LLCs, but more often they're 'real' -- and sometimes even lucrative -- businesses that exist solely to turn around the 30-day shipping time from Aliexpress or the 60-90 day time for actual in-country-of-origin purchases, from the smallest batch-of-ten on eBay to ARTIVIEW selling 700 on Amazon. Getting them kicked off Amazon or sued in court isn't going to get much money back: no small portion are judgement proof.
In theory, you could sue Amazon to put the fear of god for every potential pirate, rather than just asking politely and smacking one pirate at a time -- there are some relevant exceptions for CDA230 -- but then you'd be a media company suing Amazon.
Why doesn't this exist for other media? To some extent, it does; you can buy storage, media players, or more often Karaoke machines that play fast and loose with IP for music or video. Books are famously prone to getting Print-on-demand cloned, especially more technical and recently-published works. But it is genuinely much less common.
The pirate claim is to borrow from Gabe Newell: "piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem". You can't buy many of the games people are looking for, and if you did you might still have to break out a soldering iron to play them 'normally'. Even games that were lucky enough to get a re-release may end up with that re-release having aged out and/or were worse. ((Some, hilariously, are freely available in ways that are more annoying to play than the pirated/ripped version.)) And that's not really true -- there are things I won't buy, and others that I won't buy at prices big game corporations want to sell -- but it's not entirely false, either.
The more cynical approach is just that the others are just not that valuable. Even if a video isn't available from a sane streaming service, or music on youtube/spotify/whatever, the next-best-thing is fine, for enough of the population that the remaining demand can't bring blood from a stone.
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