Nintendo’s lawyers argued in a letter to Valve that Dolphin operates by incorporating Nintendo’s “proprietary cryptographic keys” by decrypting the ROMs of GameCube and Wii software, thereby violating the DMCA. Nintendo is referring to the Wii Common Key, a decryption key built into Wii hardware that was extracted more than a decade ago by a separate group — known as Team Twiizers — and incorporated into Dolphin’s code.
The team behind Dolphin argued in their blog post about the emulator’s Steam release that “only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention,” and that using the Wii Common Key does not apply to GameCube games.
It doesn’t. Encryption keys are not code and are not copyrightable. Distributing them is also not illegal. The word “proprietary” here is meaningless at best and dishonest at worst.
Of course actually using that key to circumvent drm may be illegal, but I’m no lawyer. Send like that would be on Dolphin’s users anyway.
Food for thought: if Nintendo genuinely thought they had a good legal argument against Dolphin, why wouldn’t they just send them a cease and desist directly instead of just getting them kicked off Steam?
They very well might now - valve went to Nintendo to ask about dolphin. Nintendo might not have looked into it previously but now they have. They recently got the android switch emulator “skyline” shut down via dcma. Dolphin might be next.
Dolphin uses literal copyrighted Nintendo code, that’s the issue.
No, it doesn’t and no, it’s not. The blog post from dolphin that I’m assuming this article is parroting articulates that perfectly.
It does actually.
It doesn’t. Encryption keys are not code and are not copyrightable. Distributing them is also not illegal. The word “proprietary” here is meaningless at best and dishonest at worst.
Of course actually using that key to circumvent drm may be illegal, but I’m no lawyer. Send like that would be on Dolphin’s users anyway.
Food for thought: if Nintendo genuinely thought they had a good legal argument against Dolphin, why wouldn’t they just send them a cease and desist directly instead of just getting them kicked off Steam?
They very well might now - valve went to Nintendo to ask about dolphin. Nintendo might not have looked into it previously but now they have. They recently got the android switch emulator “skyline” shut down via dcma. Dolphin might be next.
There’s no chance that a company as litigious as Nintendo somehow didn’t know Dolphin existed or how it works.
They know that they have no chance of winning because Dolphin is legal.