I disagree. Sure, companies have a moral right to recoup their R&D costs on a console, but I fully reject the Divine Right of Shareholders. As long as the emulators aren't sold for profit and no one is hurt, a multibillion dollar company like Nintendo has zero moral ground to tell us that we cannot emulate consoles that we have bought to play games that we also bought.
The key wasn't used in a book or in the hex values for a flag. That's like saying the formula for Coke can't be proprietary because it could be put in a book.
Software can absolutely be proprietary, and that key is part of the software.
Fuck that and proprietary recipes too. It's just a scheme to manufacture scarcity and grant everlasting monopolies on production.
Both things should be in the public domain by now, the concept of century plus term copyright is a grift to own culture, they're just going to keep extending it until companies can have permanent ownership of ideas.
IANAL, but from a EU-centric perspective on copyright (which is the only one I can reliably talk about) the idea of a proprietary encryption key is bogus. A creative work can be copyrighted if it has sufficient originality (or under some other very specific conditions). Smaller parts of such a work are not copyrighted if they don't meet that criteria on their own. The encryption key (which is very probably randomly generated and definitely not a creative work) thus can't be copyrighted on it's own. At least in the EU, there should be no argument against sharing said key (at least in respect to copyright).
I honestly can't talk about other jurisdictions (maybe someone else here can) but I imagine it should be similar to this in many other countries.
Sharing isn’t the issue. The emulator was profiting from it.
I wrote about sharing but even profiting from it should be legally permissible.
If I copied your house key and sold it, would that be alright?
Of course not. There are laws against that. Laws that are not copyright laws.
but I don’t lie to myself that it’s morally defensible.
Oh, sorry, I thought this was about legality. If we want to talk about the morality of evading copyright we should also about the morality of copyright itself, how it historically came to be and whose interests it was supposed to serve (it wasn't made to support creatives). Actually there is surprisingly little evidence that the introduction of copyright increased the incentives for creatives to publish or made them wealthier (except a select few). I think there is a better case to be made for the morality of sharing creative works unlawfully than for limiting the sharing of those works for a century after their creation.