Former Dolphin team member addresses Steam/Valve’s takedown of Dolphin emulator

That way, defunct titles fall out of copyright protection automatically, unless someone is there to extend them, and pay the costs associated.

Disney and their Vault would change real fast if stuff lost copyright while they hide it.

Same for consoles and games, if I can't buy it any more, it's free to emulate and copy.

Copyright is working as designed. In fact it's weaker in the USA than elsewhere, where it plugs into the broader concept of authors' rights. Because a work reflects on its author's reputation, that author has broad latitude in determining whether and how their work gets presented and distributed. If Disney decides that Song of the South needs to go into the Disney Vault forever, they are within their rights to decide that, per the principle of authors' rights, not just the letter of copyright law.

> In this case, none of this process was followed. To the best of my understanding, this is what happened:

> 1. Valve legal contacted Nintendo of America to ask "hey, what do you think about Dolphin?"

> 2. Nintendo replied to Valve "we think it's bad and also that it violates the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions" (note: nothing about violating copyright itself). Also "please take it down".

> 3. Valve legal takes it down and forwards NoA's reply to the Dolphin Foundation contact address.

edit: I think their note isn't exactly accurate either. As far as I know, the anti-circumvention provisions are a part of DMCA and copyright as a whole. Though, this does not sound like it was a proactive decision by Nintendo, so I am doubtful they have plans to sue the organization behind Dolphin's emulator.

edit 2: Though, the response back to Valve, however it may have occurred, was the following

> 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

I think this is where DMCA has overreach imho. It's one of the worst pieces of legislations to have been created regarding copyright and intellectual property.

Way back in the early days of emulation, I recall that PS1 emulators (before a workable reverse engineered BIOS was available) would be distributed, but you had to find a bios dump and provide it to the emulator to actually load a game. This helped avoid infringement but of course was a 'hurdle' in getting things running. TBF, it wasn't that bad if you knew how to search right or had a buddy in the scene that knew a good place to download one [0].

On an unrelated note, is it bad that (most of) those early emulation sites seemed less intrusive with popups/adverts than the legitimate news sites of today?

[0] - There was a period where anyone brave enough to distribute a BIOS but allow their page to get indexed by a search engine, stood a good risk of getting a C&D/DMCA.

However, most people aren't very Linux savvy and even Linux savvy people will need to deal with the small screen. You can pick between running shell commands or running Flatpak through discover, and I honestly can't tell which one takes longer. Typing commands on the deck sucks despite Valve's best efforts but Discover + Flatpak seems awfully slow for no clear reason whenever I use it.

Installing Dolphin through the controller optimized game interface would be a lot more user friendly. It would also help with Steam's native input UI, allowing the devs to set good presets for their emulators, and it saves having tk manually add a Steam shortcut and setting up the right properties to make the emulator usable from game mode.

In another timeline where the Wii was jailbroken earlier the standard might have been to distribute decrypted versions, but that's not how it worked out.