The world of crowdsourcing sure is weird, and in recent years we’ve seen platforms like Patreon used to fund development of emulators. Questions of legality in that domain remain to be asked or answered, but for now the act of creating or using an emulator itself is not illegal. Atlus however, developer of the Persona series, took to the DMCA route to attempt to shut down such funding for RPCS3, a PlayStation 3 emulator currently in development.
RPCS3 seemed to be heavily focusing on Persona 5 , the most recent entry in the JRPG series. Getting that game to run on the emulator seemed to be a good point of focus for continuing progress on getting RPCS3 up to snuff. Advertising compatibility and focusing updates on the game caused Atlus to take notice, and the company sent a DCMA takedown request to Patreon itself, rather than the emulator’s developers. Patreon didn’t cooperate, although after some talks with the RPCS3 team, the emulator’s developers opted to remove mention of Persona 5 entirely from its website.
After making waves on the Internet, Atlus released a statement saying things like, “the best way to experience Persona 5 is on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3,” and “ when our content is illegally circumvented [meaning DRM]… it undermines out ability to [continue making games] by diverting potential support for new audiences.” Atlus is framing this as players wanting to play Persona 5 on PC being the fueling motivation for this emulation.
Regardless of who may or may not be right, Atlus has no legal power over an emulator, which allows development to continue under the pretense that they do not support piracy of software (provide instructions, etc.).
Source: Atlus