Following the leak of The Legend of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, and a cease and desist letter to Android’s Switch emulator Skyline, Nintendo seems to be ramping up against emulators and its developers. The latest episode involves Valve and the Steam catalog as well as the popular Dolphin Emulator. The Japanese giant forced Valve through a DMCA notice, to delist Dolphin from the Steam Store. The company cites that the software violates the mega-corporation intellectual property rights.
Dolphin Emulator days on Steam are over – Nintendo sends DMCA letter
According to a letter spotted by PC Gamer, the Big N urged Valve to remove the app. The letter says Valve had an “obligation to remove the offering of the Dolphin emulator from the Steam store”.
“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,” Nintendo’s demand stated.
It is worth noting that the message was directly sent to Valve. The Dolphin development team was unaware of the issue until they contacted Valve. At the time of the writing, Valve has indeed removed the emulator from the store page. The Dolphin team is yet to confirm how, or even if, they will challenge the claim with a counter-notice. However, we don’t think this will be easy.
The Dolphin team expressed their disappointment via their website over the removal.
“We were notified by Valve that Nintendo has issued a cease and desist citing the DMCA against Dolphin’s Steam page, and have removed Dolphin from Steam until the matter is settled. We are currently investigating our options and will have a more in-depth response in the near future. We appreciate your patience in the meantime.”
Is Dolphin illegal?
In Dolphin’s Steam description, there was a disclaimer stating that the “app does not come with games” and would require players to “own an original copy of the game”. Emulation does not violate legal barriers, but sharing ROMs with copyright does. In other words, running games via an emulator is not illegal if you own the game. Downloading and Sharing Games through the internet is the illegal practice. The emulator release on Steam promised support for 4K displays, modern controllers, and internet play. It was open-source and was available for “free”. It’s not like the Dolphin Development team was trying to make easy money from it.
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In case you’re unaware, the Big N is well-known for its heavy copyright claims. You can check this report from Wired that says how this, sometimes, backfires on the company’s reputation among fans. It’s no surprise to see them trying to repress people from getting access to the emulator because of its potential use. Dolphin on Steam would give easy access to millions of PC players. In fact, it would also allow Steam Deck players to play Game Cube or Wii games while on-the-go. Nintendo’s biggest concern is that this could ultimately push people into piracy of games. There are millions of websites sharing ROMs illegaly across the web – that is the dark side of emulation. An emulator so many features could push people to download more and more games in non-legal ways.
Now, the future of the app on Steam is uncertain. The developers will study the measures that can be taken, but it’s hard to believe in an official comeback.
Skyline Team had to stop the development of its Switch emulator a few weeks back
To recall, the big N already moved against another emulator team earlier this month. The Skyline Team was developing an emulator – with the same name – for Android phones. With it, it was possible to play some Switch games. The move was pretty obvious considering that the Switch is Nintendo’s current console for sale. If one player gets access to a Switch game via emulation, there is a high chance that he will never buy one.
The dev team also got a DMCA takedown notice from the Big N. The catch is that the takedown is tied to Lockpick on GitHub – a homebrew software that dumps Switch security keys which are then used with this emulator.
The dev team stated to explain their decision:
“We find ourselves in a position where we are potentially violating [Nintendo’s] copyright by continuing to develop our project, Skyline, by dumping keys from our own Switches…All development on Skyline has been ceased due to the potential legal risks involved, this site will remain up for the time being but may be taken down in the future.”
There is another popular Switch emulator on PCs, that could be the next victim if the campaign against emulation continues.
Is Emulation Legal?
Worth noting that emulators are legal. Just like any music player, they will only process the files you load through them. The problem is that most of the ROMs have copyrights involved (as music does), so to keep things in a legal manner, you need to make sure to load files that you currently own. Retro emulators (SNES, Genesis, PSX) usually won’t suffer much with this, but those aiming at modern consoles are an easy target for DMCA claims. After all, they can hurt games that are still “on-sale”. Technically, if you own Game Cube or Wii games and want to have a backup copy of them on your PC, you can. With emulators like Dolphin, you can run these copies and play the games as on the original platforms.
