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Originally Posted by willravel
To summerize, you cannot produce, have, or market a divice or service that circumvents legal ownership. PearPC has broken all three.
I understand exactly what this means. Do you?
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Yes. PearPC does not circumvent ownership of a copywritable work. Apple owns their operating system - PearPC does NOT provide illegal copies of the Mac OS. It simply emulates a hardware platform that can run Mac OS. They have not broken any law. The DMCA would apply if PearPC broke Apple's digital protection on their OS, but that is not the case. The PearPC website will tell you you need to have a valid Mac OS CD in order to install any operating system.
You seem to have a bit of confusion over what emulators do - You mentioned up above that PC emulators "pay money to windows". That's incorrect. Microsoft (which I think is what you meant when you said 'windows') does not own the PC hardware architecture. They only produce software for that hardware platform - many companies do. Linux is another operating system that runs on x86 hardware - they have nothing to do with Microsoft.
What the emulator coders do is make a piece of software that interprets machine instructions just like the original hardware. Again, no one can own the rights to these machines - they can own their implementation of it. Otherwise, AMD would be in a lot of trouble for producing x86 (invented by Intel) chips. So emulator writers, through trial and error and freely available knowledge, try to make something that acts exactly the same as the original hardware. They never succeed 100%, but they can come close enough for usability. These emulators are entirely legal. In fact, there's a huge market for emulators of all sorts of machines - if you are developing software for hand-held devices, for instance, you'll use an emulator to run it for most of your development cycle.
There are also some OS emulators, which are slightly different - things like WINE for Linux, or FreeDOS. These do the same thing but instead of replicating the machine codes, they replicate the OS API calls. They're also perfectly legal, provided they don't use any copyrighted materials from the emulated OS. But again, PearPC and BasiliskII both require that you provide your own copy of the OS - all they emulate is the underlying machine hardware.
I hope this clears things up for you. I suggest you do a search on Google for a more in-depth explanation of reverse-engineering and hardware emulation.
Bingle