After being kicked off Steam, Dolphin emulator devs say Nintendo's legal claim 'is a reach': 'Now that we have talked to a lawyer, we are no longer concerned'
Six weeks after GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin was removed from Steam due to a letter from Nintendo claiming it «violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights,» the emulator's developers have issued a detailed response on the Dolphin blog. The response, with input from legal counsel, announces that the Dolphin team will not be re-attempting to launch the emulator on Steam. «We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam,» the post states. «Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it… 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.»
That announcement is just a brief portion of the post, however. More significantly, the Dolphin blog pushes back on Nintendo's claim that the emulator violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by including «proprietary cryptographic keys» used to decrypt Wii and GameCube games, and declares that it will not be removing the Wii's encryption key from its source code.
«This sounds extremely bad at a glance (and we certainly had a moment of panic after first reading it), but now that we have done our homework and talked to a lawyer, we are no longer concerned,» the Dolphin team says. «We have a very strong argument that Dolphin is not primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection.»
This specific element of Nintendo's claim against Dolphin requires a bit of explanation, because it was widely (and heatedly) discussed after the emulator was removed from Steam. In a video that pulled in nearly 300,000 views, prominent game developer and emulation community member ModernVintageGamer said that
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