This situation is beyond ridiculous: the Japanese company simply refuses to accept the concept of “a backup copy,” which means that the emulation does not violate any laws or harm Nintendo!

At the end of March, the Dolphin team announced their emulator for running Nintendo GameCube and Wii games on PC would be released on Steam. The group said they had been working on them for months to make the emulator available on Steam. But it seems that Dolphin will not be on Valve’s platform, as Nintendo has sent a DMCA claim to Gabe Newell’s company!

“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,” says the document, dated May 26, according to PCGamer. The document first notifies the platform owner, who then must inform the software developers, meaning Dolphin must be told.

The developers, in turn, can file a counterclaim if they believe the emulator does NOT violate the DMCA. If they decide to do so, the Japanese company has about two weeks to sue the makers of Dolphin. If it doesn’t, Dolphin has a chance of resurfacing on Steam. Will Nintendo be so ballsy (and despicable) to take the case to court?

Previously, Sony filed lawsuits against Bleem! and Connectix, both of which concluded that the emulators did not infringe copyright by using PlayStaion’s BIOS and firmware. “The Dolphin emulator operates by incorporating these cryptographic keys without Nintendo’s authorization and decrypting the ROMs at or immediately before runtime. Thus, use of the Dolphin emulator unlawfully circumvent[s] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under the Copyright Act,” the DMCA notice states.

Once again, let the brain cells in the back get it. If you have a disc of a game, you have the right to back it up. So if you run the game on a PC, you are not pirating it, you are not infringing Nintendo’s intellectual property rights, and you are not committing a crime. That is what the Japanese company should understand. Not all emulation is harmful.

Source: PCGamer