Question - Legal + Selling Portables

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Quick question,

I was talking to my dad about helping me out with Portables (because he's good with cars), and he brought up something that didn't really make sense to me, but I want to triple check with people who have sold them before.

He said that when you sell Portables, you can actually get sued by Nintendo depending on how much money you make and how many you actually sell...wot?

Can I get a confirmation this isn't the case? Because Nintendo definitely wouldn't be able to sue me if I sold an unmodded console.
 
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Myself and most likely hundreds others have sold portables over many years and no one (that we're aware of) has ever experienced even a head-turn from any of the companies who's hardware we modify and sell.

At least in the United States, from everything I've looked into I've yet to find any laws saying you cannot modify your property (the console) in ways that are not harmful to others (don't make a bomb).

The sale of that modified console is no different than selling say a broken console or a custom painted console much like you said. There's no copyright infringement since you're not doing something like dumping/re-writing the BIOS of the console to use for profit, etc. , you can see where I'm going with this.

When it comes to older consoles, there is an infinitely small chance anyone like Nintendo, SEGA, Sony would even care that someone is selling a modded version of old hardware, let alone try and find some weird law to try and press charges against them, even if you started to make a noticeable amount of money from them. If for some crazy crazy reason this happened, they would simply send a Cease and Desist letter to you much like they do with software modders.

While this is true, there have been legal cases against people that sell modded consoles for profit that come pre-loaded with pirated games which is obviously illegal. DO NOT SEND SD CARDS, THUMB DRIVES, OR ANY OTHER FORM OF PHYSICAL MEDIA THAT IS NOT THE ORIGINAL LICENSED COPY TO ANYONE FOR PROFIT. There are a surprising number of people that don't seem to understand doing this, even if the buyer owns the game, is illegal and is bad practice. Although again I can't imagine if it's a one time incident of ignorance anything will happen to you legally.

Most importantly, where I get kind of fuzzy on how this side of things work there are even companies like Hyperkin that sell commercial reproductions of these consoles.

See the SupaBoy (SNES portable), and their Retron Series.

I believe this is because the patents have expired for those consoles, but that doesn't explain the inclusion of GBA support in their Retron 5, so look into that if you really really care.
 

Doom

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If you're worried about it (you really don't need to be because of everything AC said) the Patents have expired on some of the older consoles. That's why the Supaboy and etc can exist at Retail.
 
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Most importantly, where I get kind of fuzzy on how this side of things work there are even companies like Hyperkin that sell commercial reproductions of these consoles.

See the SupaBoy (SNES portable), and their Retron Series.

I believe this is because the patents have expired for those consoles, but that doesn't explain the inclusion of GBA support in their Retron 5, so look into that if you really really care.
From my understanding the device clones are legal after so many years because the patent expires or it enters public domain. So I believe you are correct in that respect.
 
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