|
Top-level
 Now onto Nintendo's legal claims: nobody can tell for sure whether Dolphin is in the right, or whether Nintendo is in the right. Like all legal matters, there is a lot of space for interpretation. Dolphin does distribute the Wii AES-128 Common Key which is used to encrypt Wii game discs. This isn't required in theory, the tools that dump game discs could just dump decrypted images, in fact that might be easier than dumping encrypted images (the decryption is done transparently by the Wii OS). 6 comments
Short FAQs 14h later to answer a few things: - What do you know about any of this in the first place? → I've been involved with Dolphin for 10+ years as a {core developer, infra maintainer, foundation board member}. More recently (since Mar 2022) I did the administrative work to onboard Dolphin on Steam. Funnily enough the notification Valve sent to the Foundation was still addressed to me personally even though I've stepped down recently :) - Why is Dolphin shipping with the Common Key instead of asking users to provide it? → Who knows! This decision was made around 15 years ago. It's easy to say with hindsight "why do you do things differently", but back then this was a fairly new situation. I wouldn't be surprised if soon we get contributors to the project that were born after this decision was made :) - Why not change that and not ship the Common Key? → Maybe the current devs will. Personally, I don't think it's useful or likely to change anything. Anti-circumvention is about providing a technical mean to bypass copy protection. If you think Dolphin violates this, the common key isn't the problem, the whole "decrypting Wii discs" feature is the problem. - Is Dolphin at risk? → I don't think the project is more at risk than in the last 15 years (pretty sure I'm jinxing it). It took Valve literally poking NoA legal for this takedown to happen. For all the shit people are giving Nintendo, I think they've been generally good to their emulation communities. Hopefully this continues! And (probably) final update in this thread: PC Gamer have updated their article after talking to an IP lawyer: > "I would characterize this NOT as a DMCA take down notice and instead as a warning shot that the software, Dolphin, if released on Steam would (in Nintendo’s view) violate the DMCA," says attorney Kellen Voyer of Voyer Law, which specializes in intellectual property and technology law. Looks like at least one lawyer shares my analysis :-) |
Gregory's Server
Whether that's allowed by exception clauses for interoperability, whether that's allowed by some kind of fair use clause, whether Nintendo's broken DRM actually counts as an effective copyright protection measure, etc. -> only a lawsuit could decide that. Your guess is probably as good or as bad as anyone else's.
EOT