![]() ![]() ![]() The Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Wii and Nintendo GameCube game files, or ROMs, are encrypted using proprietary cryptographic keys. § 1201), particularly because Dolphin has to decrypt Wii games. Fueling this is Nintendo's letter to Valve, which cites the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA ( 17 U.S.C. US law regarding this has not changed, yet a lot of armchair lawyers have come out talking about how foolish we were to ship the Wii Common Key. These keys have been publicly available for years and no one has really cared. ![]() ![]() It was freely shared everywhere, and eventually made its way into Dolphin's codebase more than 15 years ago (committed by a Team Twiizers member no less). The extraction of the Wii Common Key did not elicit any kind of legal response from anyone. If you aren't familiar with Team Twiizers, perhaps you know them under their modern name: fail0verflow. It's an incredibly entertaining video that's worth your time. If you haven't heard this story before, we highly recommend checking out the 25c3 presentation on the actual Tweezer Exploit that gave Team Twiizers its original name. Wii software does not have any access to the key whatsoever, however, some smart engineers and a pair of tweezers was all it took to extract the key. As you may know, Wii games are encrypted, and the Wii uses the "common key" that is burned into the console to decrypt Wii discs. Over the past few weeks, a lot has been said about Dolphin including the Wii Common Key. But there are some more serious matters to discuss, some that are much bigger than Dolphin's Steam Release. 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. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. 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. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. 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. 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. What actually happened was that Valve's legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened? ¶įirst things first - Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. And to be clear, all of the analysis below is specifically regarding US law. We'd like to thank Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law for providing us with legal council for this matter. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. ![]()
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