Nintendo attacks again and now Dolphin is affected by leaving the Steam catalog

Dolphin

Dolphin is an emulator for Nintendo GameCube and Wii that works on Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.

It seems that Nintendo have not taken things so lightly on the issue of emulators and everything indicates that has started with a merciless war against the emulators of their different consoles. And it is that recently we shared here in the blog the news about blocking repositories Lockpick and Lockpick_RCM.

And now this time Nintendo has gone against dolphin, specifically by requesting Valve to remove a page (archived) from the upcoming release of the Dolphin emulator on the Steam platform after receiving a letter from Nintendo's lawyers citing a violation of the draft Copyright Law.

It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the release of Dolphin on Steam has been postponed indefinitely. Valve has notified us that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin's Steam page, and has removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is resolved. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more detailed answer in the near future.

We appreciate your patience in the meantime.

Unfortunately, for anyone waiting for Dolphin's arrival on Steam, development has been "postponed indefinitely" following a cease and desist from Nintendo. It's no surprise that Nintendo takes steps to try and prevent this, especially since Dolphin would likely have been available on Steam Deck, Valve's Nintendo Switch alternative.

Nintendo's letter to Valve claims emulator 'infringes proprietary rights' Nintendo's intellectual property' and 'works by embedding these cryptographic keys without Nintendo's authorization and decrypting the ROMs at runtime or immediately before.' About the letter, it is mentioned that this as such was not an official request, but a request and proposal to discuss the situation if there are questions.

For those who do not know about the project Dolphinthey should know whatan emulator is developed for the Nintendo GameCube and Wii video consoles, that allows you to run games prepared for these consoles on a normal PC in Full HD mode.

To prevent pirated copies of games from running on Nintendo consoles and to prevent games from being copied to unauthorized devices, consoles encrypt firmware content and game files using proprietary cryptographic keys. Nintendo owns or manages the copyrights to Wii and GameCub games and is responsible for the licenses to distribute games for their devices. The terms of use of the games allow you to launch them exclusively on your game console.

This is where why the emulator has generated the conflict comes into play, as contains something called a Wii Common Key, which is used to crack Wii games and, according to Nintendo, allows Dolphin to 'illegally circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected by Copyright Law'.

Dolphinse is rolling out under the GPLv2+ license and a release on the Steam platform, which would make it easy to install Dolphin on Valve's Steam Deck consoles, is planned for Q2023 XNUMX.

According to Nintendo's lawyers, the use of the Dolphin emulator results in an illegal circumvention of technical protection measures for access to copyright-protected content. Nintendo's position is supported by the fact that Dolphin's codebase includes an encryption key of data for Wii consoles, which became public domain after a leak in 2008.

Providing this key is subject to DMCA violation and it can become an excuse, for example, to submit a request to lock the Dolphin repository on GitHub, as happened with the Lockpick project.

As one of the options that would avoid further claims, the use of a scheme in which the user independently finds and provides decryption keys is considered, but the request for such keys can still be subject to “protection bypass”, even if the user did not find the key on the Internet, and took it out of his console. On the other hand, such actions can be construed as fair use.

Source: https://es.dolphin-emu.org/


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