Retro emulation gadgets, the ones that look like an alternate universe version of a Game Boy Advance, are enormously popular. They’re cheap, portable, and capable of running pretty much any console game made before 2000 or so (and sometimes beyond). But the companies running them sometimes have a less-than-legal approach to ROMs themselves, and that’s creating problems.

Italian YouTube gamer Francesco Salicini, AKA Once Were Nerd, documents and reviews these gadgets professionally. And for that, he’s been investigated by the police, and his home and computers have been searched. At issue is the fact that some of these gadgets come pre-loaded with hundreds or even thousands of old game ROM files, which is technically piracy and copyright infringement pretty much everywhere. Salicini is currently under investigation for breaking copyright with a maximum penalty of 15,000 euro and up to three years in prison, and his YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook accounts could be shut down. Under Italian law, these shutdowns can apparently happen even before he’s charged with a crime, if he’s ever charged at all.

As part of the investigation, Salicini’s home has been searched and “more than 30” consoles seized, with Tom’s Hardware reporting well-known brands in this small space like Anbernic, TrimUI, and PowKiddy. The presence of pirated ROMs on those consoles could be evidence against Salicini, though whether he obtained the ROMs himself (and whether he did so legally) or they were pre-loaded onto the consoles before purchase will probably be relevant.

Some of these companies have been known to pre-load ROMs onto their consoles and the MicroSD cards that often come with them, which again, is textbook piracy. And a lot of them aren’t shy about it. Here’s a StackSocial ad on Yahoo for a set-top box that proudly proclaims it’s “preloaded with over 70,000 retro titles from more than 40 consoles.” That amount of games would be essentially impossible to obtain without piracy. The gadget’s store listing says it flat-out: it’s pre-loaded with Dark Souls, The Last of Us, Counter-Strike, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Sonic The Hedgehog, and Final Fantasy VII, among “thousands” of others.

Normally I’d tiptoe around accusations of actual criminal activity. But c’mon, you’re not getting famous, in-demand games from companies like Nintendo, Sega, Square-Enix, and Naughty Dog together on one gadget, essentially thrown in for free, without resorting to piracy. Either that ad is fully lying about the games included in the device, or the company loaded up stolen game files illegally. There’s just no other way around it, and anyone who’s even vaguely familiar with how video game distribution works knows this.

After completing this story, and in the knowledge that StackSocial is a partner of PCWorld, I quickly searched our own site and found the same console available. I’ve alerted my editors, who are having the listing removed, but agreed that documenting it here as part of this story was important.

There are plenty of well-documented similar examples, up to and including a sort of “app store” for pirated ROMs pre-loaded onto devices for easy browsing and downloading. Well-known company Anbernic raised eyebrows earlier this year by pre-loading devices with said app, brazenly enabling copyright violation and inviting its gadget users to actively choose and download said ROMs, before apparently backtracking out of self-preservation.

So, if you buy one of these gadgets in the reasonable knowledge that you’re engaging in secondhand piracy, are you legally culpable for the manufacturer’s actions? And does reviewing the gadget on YouTube qualify as “advertising” it, as Italian authorities apparently indicate, and thus also count as evidence of your crime?

It seems unlikely that the average Joe buying these gadgets is going to get their door kicked down by police. Salicini’s YouTube channel has a modest 50,000 subscribers at the time of writing, but that’s enough to possibly attract the ire of litigious companies like Nintendo, and its army of lawyers that salivate at the mention of emulators and ROMs.

A more likely outcome is that companies will simply sue these manufacturers out of existence (or at least out of major markets beyond China), as is Nintendo’s approach to the software side of emulation. But that’s hardly a balm to a YouTube gamer who’s caught in the crossfire.

Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld