Nintendo sends Valve DMCA notice to block Steam release of Wii emulator Dolphin
On Friday, the developers behind open source GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin received a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo blocking Dolphin's impending release on Steam.
The development team launched a Steam page on March 28 and announced it on the Dolphin blog, writing: «We're pleased to finally tell the world of our experiment. This has been the product of many months of work, and we look forward to getting it into users' hands soon!»
The legal notice, reviewed by PC Gamer, is addressed to Valve's legal department and dated May 26, 2023.
«Because the Dolphin emulator violates Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, including but not limited to its rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)’s Anti-Circumvention and AntiTrafficking provisions, 17 U.S.C. § 1201, we provide this notice to you of your obligation to remove the offering of the Dolphin emulator from the Steam store,» reads the document.
Under the DMCA, notices like this one are sent to service providers—Valve, in this case—who then must notify the allegedly infringing party. The Dolphin development team has the option to file a counter-notice with Valve if it believes the emulator doesn't violate the DMCA as Nintendo claims, or to comply with the takedown. If the team does file a counterclaim, as explained by Copyright Alliance, Nintendo has about two weeks to decide whether to sue. If it doesn't, Dolphin could then potentially be re-added to Steam.
The question is whether Nintendo would truly pursue legal action in this case—and if it did, what would happen. A ruling in either direction would have far-reaching implications for emulation, as most if not all emulators of modern game systems could likely be held in violation of the DMCA's
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