The RIAA is not a popular name amongst many music consumers. Its actions against potential copyright infringement have created a huge backlash amongst the community, and it has done little if anything to alleviate the general ill will. Now, the video game industry risks following the same path. For years, the industry has attacked video game emulation and the copying of cartridges as detrimental to the industry and illegal. While it has succeeded in many places (and failed in others), the gaming community has started to become angry. Unless some middle ground can be found (such as has been attempted by websites such as vNES), this pursuit of piracy could turn the ESA into the next RIAA.

Another landmark emulation case, although slightly different from the Connectix one.  Bleem was another emulator for the Sony Playstation, and Sony sued it for the use of copyrighted images on their packaging.  Basically, on its packaging Bleem compared what a video game looked like on a Playstation vs. what it looked like on the emulator.  To do this, they used screen shots of Sony video games, which Sony contested.  Bleem, of course, claimed fair use.  The court decided in agreement with Bleem, noting that the use of copyrighted images fell under fair use because it was comparative advertising.  Since Bleem is a direct competitor to the Playstation, it needs to be able to use copyrighted material in order to make a successful advertisement.  Sony even claimed that Bleem was hurting the market for screen shots by using them in advertising, but the court shot that argument down as well, stating that Sony could still use the screen shots in advertising if they wanted to.  Also, since a screen shot is an absurdly small portion of the total work, Bleem is not actually copying that much from Sony. 

Similar to the Connectix case, the Bleem case drove home to the video game industry that contesting emulators themselves would lead nowhere.  With emulators being fully allowed to advertise using copyrighted video games, there was no need to hide their real uses.  Emulators and their creators are free to proudly display the abilities of their systems, without fear of any legal reprisal.  This makes it much easier to distribute a particular emulator using advertising, and in turn makes emulators much more widespread.  If this decision had gone the other way then the difficulty in advertising an emulator (remember, you wouldn’t be able to use any copyrighted shots in the advertising) would have been a huge obstacle to distribution.  But, without any legal recourse to stop the distribution of emulators or make them harder to spread, the video game industry needs to focus on the people illegally distributing the actual games, not the programs that play the games.

The definitive video game emulation case. In the late 1990's, Connectix created the Virtual Game Station, a commercial emulator designed to replicate the Sony Playstation on a PC. In doing so, they necessarily had to copy elements of the Sony BIOS (built-in operating system (the software that runs the Playstation)), but they claimed fair use. The court agreed, noting that law stated that disassembly could be considered fair use when it is the "only way to gain access to the ideas and functional elements embodied in a copyrighted computer program." Since Sony had provided little information about their BIOS to the public, Connectix could only gain access to it by taking it apart. The court also found VGS to be "moderately transformative"; it transfers the Playstation to a new platform, and thereby expresses the product in a different fashion. And since the VGS is transformative, it is not really a replacement for the Playstation. The court also ruled on the claim that Connectix tarnished Sony's Playstation name. Although the VGS does not play games as well as an actual Playstation, the court did not find that this would result in the VGS hurting Playstation's good name

This case follows sound logic, and clearly sets out the argument that emulation itself is perfectly legitimate. It clearly outlines exactly how Connectix copied Sony's BIOS, and explains why that path resulted in VGS being fair use (and in doing so, more or less created guidelines as to how to ensure the legality of an emulator). More importantly, this case made it clear to video game companies that contesting emulation itself would not succeed; if video game companies were intent on stopping piracy, they would have to go after the actual copies of the games, not the emulators. Since ROM files are much more prevalent than emulators, this decision in essence made it much more difficult to stop video game piracy, and forced companies to allow the creation of dozens of free emulators.