LogInThe team has shared a lengthy statement explaining what actually happened between them and Valve and Nintendo.
In late May, the creators of Dolphin, a popular emulator for GameCube and Wii, made an announcement regarding the Steam port of their emulator, revealing that the Steam release would be put on hold indefinitely due to a cease and desist letter from Nintendo. "We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin's Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled," wrote the development team back then.
Nearly two months after the initial announcement, the matter seems to have finally been settled. The Dolphin team recently issued a new rather lengthy statement declaring that they have decided to completely cancel the Steam release of their emulator.
"We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam," stated the team. "Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that's that."
Additionally, the announcement elaborated on what actually happened between the Dolphin team, Valve, and Nintendo, with the team calling the first statement "fairly frantic" and clarifying that neither Valve nor Dolphin received a DMCA Takedown Notice from Nintendo. Moreover, Nintendo has not pursued any legal action against them.
"What actually happened was that Valve's legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam," reads the statement. "In reply to this, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America requested Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the Steam store, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded us the statement from Nintendo's lawyers, and told us that we had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however, after being flooded with questions, we wrote a fairly frantic statement on the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation."
Furthermore, the Dolphin team has provided additional in-depth clarification concerning their use of Nintendo's Wii Common Key. They assert that, following consultations with legal experts, they firmly believe their inclusion of the key is not unlawful, and they have no intentions of removing it.
"The extraction of the Wii Common Key did not elicit any kind of legal response from anyone. It was freely shared everywhere, and eventually made its way into Dolphin's codebase more than 15 years ago," they wrote. "These keys have been publicly available for years and no one has really cared. US law regarding this has not changed.
17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) is a significant legal protection for emulation in the US, and it is why Nintendo has yet to legally challenge any emulator with the DMCA anti-circumvention clauses despite the law going into effect 25 years ago. Unless a court rules that our understanding of the law is incorrect, we have every reason to believe that our decryption of Wii game discs is covered by this exemption.
The letter to Valve did not make any claims that we were violating a US copyright by including the Wii Common Key, as a short string of entirely random letters and numbers generated by a machine is not copyrightable under current US copyright law. If that ever changes, the world will be far too busy to think about emulation. We do not believe that Dolphin is in any legal danger."
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