The team behind the emulator for Nintendo’s GameCube and Wii games has given up on a release on Valve’s digital platform.

We previously reported that Valve had received a letter from Nintendo in which the Japanese company described Dolphin as an infringement of Big N’s intellectual property rights. “We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for the 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,” the Dolphin team wrote on their blog.

The post further rejects Nintendo’s claim that the emulator infringes its copyright (DMCA) because it contains “proprietary cryptographic keys” used to decrypt Wii and GameCube games and states that it will not remove the Wii 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. We have a powerful argument that Dolphin is not primarily designed or produced for circumventing protection.”

ModernVintageGamer (MVG) explained in a video that the Dolphin team had made a mistake by decrypting the Wii using the AES-128 Common Key in the emulator’s source code. Wikipedia has an entry about the illegal number, and the developers used them in their program, and a programmer on Reddit says they are lucky that they only lost the Steam version and not the entire source code.

In their blog post, the developers deny that the Wii’s use of the AES-128 Common Key violates the DMCA, which prohibits technology that “is primarily designed or produced to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.” They cited the reverse engineering section of the law, which permits the bypassing of technology “to enable interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs.” They argue that this gives them significant legal protection in the US and that it is why Nintendo has not been able to take legal action against any emulator in the last 25 years (since the law came into force).

However, once you buy a game, you can emulate it on a PC, regardless of what the developers use. And Nintendo simply cannot interfere with that.

Source: PCGamer