Legality of ripping ISOs from Wii disk [closed]

Question

I own a Wii Console as well as peripheral parts such as the Wiimote, the Nunchuck and even the Wii board as well as some games in form of physical in store bought disks.

I would like to play those games on my PC using an emulator (dolphin, I suppose) without downloading ROMs from the internet which is obviously illegal.

So I would like to somehow play the games using my already owned disks. I read about programs called rawdump to extract the ISO from the Disk using a special drive.

I also read about CleanRip to extract ISOs using your Wii and the disks directly over a SD Card or USB-Stick.

But I am concerned about legality. This seems to be a grey area. Just the fact that it is called CleanRIP implies its not intended and could potentially violate copyright laws.

What approach should I take? Or does it straight up not matter? Or can I play the games without extracting the ISOs at all? Like just plugging in my Wii or the optical drive and have my pc directly read it off of the disk?

Thank you in advance I hope the question was clear.

Answer 1

I am not a lawyer. But it is the general understanding across the internet that your approach of "I'll rip the game myself rather than downloading it" is valid, and is in fact the preferred way to emulate games without running into legal problems. As you noted, downloading ROMs from the internet is the illegal part - it is perfectly fine to rip the game, store the files on your personal computer, and do whatever you want with them (such as using an emulator to access them) as long are you aren't redistributing them.

This Wikipedia article seems to agree with me, at least in the context of USA law.

Answer 2

I am also not a lawyer, but my understanding is that, in the US, this has been a hotly contested legal topic for years.

While the "right to backup" is often considered fair use, under the DMCA it's illegal to break copyright protection (DRM) for any reason. Since Wii discs have DRM, it's not possible to back them up without breaking the law.

I believe EU laws are much more lenient.