Isn't this pirating? I'm confused.
Depends on how it's done and if or how it's released. I'm opining generally not about this specific instance - if he or she is emulating a copy of the game that wasn't legally acquired then that would be a single instance. If it were a network of folks working on a single copy of the game that was distributed in the emulator then that would be one instance per user.
Emulation itself is not piracy at all and only illegal if the material was compromised in a fashion that is illegal - and that varies from place to place.
I am a big fan of aspects of the Emulation scene and you don't have to touch pirated roms to play a huge amount of new public domain games for moribund systems like ColecoVision and vectrex.
If you have MAME and every commercial ROM in christendom then that's piracy unless you happen to own ten thousand arcade machines.
The morality is tricky because a lot of pirated emulated games are still current retail products and that's pretty black and white piracy. Where it gets gray is abandonware and unreleased material that was once or currently owned by someone.
I would LOVE a subscription based ROM and emulation service so I could play literally thousands and thousands of antique games without breaking the law or in some cases ripping off folks who could still be earning a living from their art.
ROMflix or ROMify.
It could work like music licensing and while individual amounts would be trifling the scene could go mainstream and make worthwhile money for the IP holders.
The only defacto negative about emulation as an art and science is that it can create a wild west scenario and occasionally make regular piracy easier by cracking copyright protections in the pursuit of improving the emulation veracity.
