Six weeks after the GameCube and Wii emulator Dolphin was removed from Steam due to a letter from Nintendo stating that it "infringes on Nintendo's intellectual property rights," the emulator's developers have issued a detailed response on the Dolphin blog. The response, which incorporates the opinion of legal counsel, announces that the Dolphin team will not be making another attempt to launch the emulator on Steam. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Given Nintendo's long-standing stance on emulators, we have determined that Valve's request to obtain Nintendo's approval to release on Steam is impossible.

However, this announcement is only part of the submission. More importantly, the Dolphin blog pushes back against Nintendo's claim that the emulator violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by including a "proprietary encryption key" used to decrypt Wii and GameCube games, and that it will not remove the Wii's encryption key from the source code Declaration.

"This sounds very bad at first glance (indeed, after first reading this, we had a moment of panic), but now that we've done our homework and talked to our lawyers, we're no longer worried," says the Dolphin team.

"There is a very strong argument that Dolphin was not designed or manufactured with the primary purpose of circumventing the protections.

This specific element of Nintendo's claim against Dolphin requires a bit of explanation, as it was widely (and heavily) discussed after the emulator was removed from Steam. In a video with nearly 300,000 views, ModernVintageGamer, a prominent game developer and member of the emulation community, said that the emulator's source code contains the Wii AES-128 Common Key used to decrypt the game Citing the fact that "Dolphin has messed this up," he stated.

MVG linked to a Wikipedia page describing the illegal numbers, and that same link was widely shared in Reddit discussions after Dolphin was removed from Steam and treated as essentially conclusive evidence. In this one on r/smashbros, for example, Reddit wrote: "I'm a programmer myself and Dolphin unfortunately used illegal numbers in their software. The Dolphin team should consider themselves lucky that only the Steam version was taken down, not the source code itself."

In a blog post today, Dolphin developers deny that including the Wii Common Key in their emulator violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions." It prohibits technology "designed or manufactured for the primary purpose of circumventing technological measures that effectively control access to works protected under this title.

"Considering that only a fraction of what we do involves circumvention, we find it unreasonable to claim that we are 'primarily for circumvention,'" says the Dolphin team.

"We do not believe that such an argument would hold up in a U.S. court. The reason the attorneys representing Nintendo made this leap was because they wanted to create a scenario in which the DMCA exemption did not apply to us.

The blog cites the reverse engineering part of the Copyright Act." Allowing "circumvention of technical measures" for the purpose of allowing interoperability between independently created computer programs and other programs, Dolphin's developers have called this entire section of the Copyright Act "an important legal protection for emulation in the U.S." and have called the law "a 25-year old Despite its enforcement, Nintendo has yet to legally challenge any emulator under the anti-avoidance provisions of the DMCA," citing it as the reason why "Nintendo has yet to challenge any emulator under the anti-avoidance provisions of the DMCA.

"We do not believe Dolphin is in legal jeopardy," the post concludes. The features planned for Dolphin's Steam release (such as the "Big Picture" UI with controller support) will be completed and available in the emulator in the coming months.

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