I’ve read the indictment, and the meat of it seems to rest mostly on their involvement in pirated ROM distribution and the marketing of their product as a pirac

I’ve read the indictment, and the meat of it seems to rest mostly on their involvement in pirated ROM distribution and the marketing of their product as a piracy enabling device. It seems as though the way they operated had simply made them party to the ‘crimes’ of the end users. Ignore the grandiose language of the DOJ. An indictment is essentially a prosecutors wish list, it presents the ‘facts’ in the way the prosecutor wants them to be presented, and represents the law in the way the prosecutor wants it to be represented. When the DOJ say “this person committed this act”, or “this act is illegal”, it’s just an accusation. Those accusations aren’t “proven” until they’ve been tried in court. Only pay attention to the core details of the allegation and ignore the rest of it. Software is constitutionally protected speech. But if your software contains copyrighted material, or is accompanied by copyrighted material (as is the case alleged here, with their ROM library), then it can still break the law. I’m also pretty sure the way that you market it can influence this too. I imagine marketing software as “to help you play pirated games” would be the same as marketing a gun as “to help you commit armed robberies”. Also the fact that they sold their software seems to have made things worse.