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What Happened to Dolphin on Steam?
- veave 3y agoIf they are so convinced that the circumvention code (which is illegal according to the DMCA) is not important, the version of Dolphin that they upload to Steam should not have the circumvention code, which would allow users to only play homebrew games.
- dathinab 3y agoread article fully not just skim it
- veave 3y agoWhat part do you think I didn't read?
- wildrhythms 3y agoThe bold text in the article in this section: >However, we do not think that including the Wii Common Key actually matters - the law could easily be interpreted to say that circumventing a Wii disc's encryption by any means is a violation. As such, it is our interpetation that removing the Wii keys would not change whether the exemption in 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f) applies to us or not. [...] And to all the armchair lawyers out there, the letter to Valve did not make any claims that we were violating a US copyright by including the Wii Common Key, as a short string of entirely random letters and numbers generated by a machine is not copyrightable under current US copyright law. If that ever changes, the world will be far too busy to think about emulation.
- happymellon 3y agoYou are talking about keys. They are talking about the circumvention code completely.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jmholla 3y agoTheir stance is that Dolphin is not primarily designed for circumvention, but is primarily designed for emulation thus the carve out the DMCA has allowing for circumvention applies: >> ...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title. >> 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(2) Paragraph 1 requires the person using the software have a legally obtained copy: > Notwithstanding the provisions of sub-section (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title. > 17 U.S.C. § 1201(f)(1) which is something Dolphin can be used for.
- ineedasername 3y agoThey're hinging their view on the word "primary" with respect to functions in the code base: "Only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention". That is only one way in which the word "primary" might be applied here, with another being the primary thing users actually do with Dolphin. A glance through sites that have such things shows that available content & downloads aren't homebrew, it's ripped game ROM & disc images. I'm saying I like this part of the DMCA, or the way Nintendo bullies people around on things like this, but the legal area here is much more gray then the Dolphin folks seem to believe.
- psd1 3y agoIf you rtfa, then you'll understand.
- veave 3y agoIf you think I didn't rtfa because I didn't mention that nintendo asked valve not to list dolphin, you are wrong. If you rtfa, you'll find that the first part of the email nintendo sent valve said that dolphin circumvents encryption, which is illegal under the DMCA. If dolphin were to strip the circumvention code, then nintendo would have no legal reason to ask valve not to list dolphin, and valve could ignore the request.
- ryanjshaw 3y agoValve is saying they'll only accept Dolphin onto Steam if Dolphin can show Nintendo has authorised it. Dolphin don't believe Nintendo will authorise the app under any circumstances, key or not, homebrew only or not. Since Dolphin can't force Valve to put an app on Steam, and neither Valve nor Nintendo will change their positions, the matter is closed.
- Aaargh20318 3y ago> valve said that dolphin circumvents encryption, which is illegal under the DMCA The article explicitly mentions that the DMCA has an exception for interoperability that they believe applies to Dolphin: > ...a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoThe code isn’t illegal for multiple reasons. For one, innocence until proven guilty in a court of law. Can you guess where this hasn’t been? Secondly, the DMCA has exceptions for emulation, which they mention in the article itself. I highly suggest you check it out, by the way; it’s a good read.
- happymellon 3y ago[flagged]
- dathinab 3y ago[flagged]
- happymellon 3y ago.
- awestroke 3y agoIt has nothing to do with legality. Valve has a business interest of removing Dolphin from their store, regardless of any keys.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rowanG077 3y agoThen I don't get that you think the key is the issue. This is not a problem whether the keys are legal or not. The article makes very clear that the issue is that Nintendo has to give approval for Dolphin to release on steam. Do you really think Nintendo would give approval if they remove the key?
- speedgoose 3y ago> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jdiff 3y agoIt can apparently be even further shortened to "read article."
- lantry 3y agoDid the other commenters even read the article? The article explains that removing the key wouldn't make a difference, because Nintendo is against emulation and Steam is requiring them to get Nintendo's approval. Even if they remove the key Nintendo won't approve, and Steam can block them from the store even if they haven't broken any laws.
- ethbr0 3y agoI think there's also an implied point that the key in a substantial codebase is more legally defensible than the key in a codebase that only provides the key. In essence, the entirety of Dolphin's functionality provides legal cover for the small amount related to the key, under DMCA exception wording. Kudos to the Dolphin team.
- henriquez 3y agoOther emulators don’t include keys but let you enter them in. I get Dolphin’s justification for leaving it in though.
- crop_rotation 3y agoThe article says that they *think* it wouldn't make a difference. I have no position on Dolphin being on Steam but it might have been worth it to try without the key once.
- rowanG077 3y agoThey need approval from Nintendo. It's as easy to ask: "Does Nintendo approve that Dolphin with the builtin Wii encryption key is released on Steam".
- veave 3y agoThey need approval from Nintendo because they include the circumvention code which is illegal under the DMCA. Whether the key is included or not doesn't change anything because the code itself is illegal as it is. But if they removed the circumvention code, Nintendo wouldn't have any right to ask for the emulator not to be published.
- mberning 3y agoIt seems odd that Valve would preemptively go and ask Nintendo for their input. Curious if they have done that for other items on Steam. It would seem that if Valve allowed this on their platform and Nintendo became upset about it they could easily point to the fact that the software is easily accessible off Steam and Nintendo has done very little about it.
- MikusR 3y agoValve is not your friend it's a for profit company that is also one of the largest Loot Box pushers and NFT sellers.
- ozyschmozy 3y agoCan you elaborate on the NFT part? The only results I get when searching for "valve nft" is valve banning nft based/related games from steam.
- EvertBouw 3y agoCSGO skins and lootboxes are tradeable digital items, but they are tied to the steam marketplace. If it used a blockchain they'd be NFTs
- chaorace 3y agoYeah and if I lit a match and dropped it in my house it'd be a housefire. Calling skins NFTs is patently false, because they are both not tokens and not non-fungible (nametags notwithstanding).
- mcpackieh 3y agoIt's not the blockchain aspect of NFTs that is particularly offensive and relevant here, it's the creation of a speculation market for the selling of textures/jpgs with artificially imposed scarcity. The only difference between what Valve does and NFTs is an irrelevant implementation detail; Valve uses a centralized database instead of a distributed ledger, which is a much smarter engineering decision but it doesn't change the fundamental nature of what they've created.
- bruce343434 3y agoWho cares honestly? Why would I want to launch dolphin through steam in the first place? Just adds bloat. Just install dolphin with your package manager and launch it via your desktop environments built in launcher ("start menu").
- isthisfoss 3y agoSome people like the convenience of a single application that saves your settings and backs your saves up to the cloud instead of many different ones you have to micromanage, especially across different machines
- Joker_vD 3y agoHey, that sounds like a package manager!
- danhor 3y agoMy package manager certainly doesn't sync settings and save files between multiple systems. But I'd be interested in one that does!
- c-hendricks 3y agoMy package manager doesn't let me stream games to my other devices My package manager doesn't have a nice controller-support UI My package manager doesn't let me set up controller mappings
- Joker_vD 3y agoWell, that's kinda my unstated serious point in that joking comment: Steam, in a sense, is a package manager but a much better one in many ways so asking to abandon Steam for the system-provided package manager (which may not even exist if we're talking about pre-Store Windows) is quite flippant.
- 3y ago
- boomboomsubban 3y agoWhat does the /s/ before the signature mean on the document sent by Nintendo? Searching the internet for it is making me increasingly upset. No I don't mean Xbox s, I put the damn thing in quotes for a reason.
- sclarisse 3y agoSignature.
- Karunamon 3y agohttps://www.adobe.com/sign/esignature-resources/s-signature.html https://www.adobe.com/sign/esignature-resources/s-signature.... tldr: a legally binding typed signature. No, I don't think it makes sense either.
- Macha 3y agoI think it makes more sense when you consider how many circumstances in which we do handwritten signatures, yet the recipient of the signature has no intent or method to verify it against your usual signature
- wut42 3y agoIt signifies a "conformed signature": a legal way to sign an electronic document using a typed signer's name instead of an actual signature.
- ineedasername 3y ago>I put the damn thing in quotes for a reason I don't remember when Google stopped honoring the "..." convention but it's very annoying
- mensetmanusman 3y agoNintendo would have to want to sell games on steam that work with emulators like dolphin. This they are afraid will hurt hardware sales, so it won’t happen.
- paulcole 3y ago> We do not believe this angle would be successful in a US courtroom, if it were ever to come to that Do they have the war chest to see this through?
- nfriedly 3y agoI'd donate. A win against Nintendo would be good for everyone.
- chaorace 3y agoA case like this would be a landmark battle in the making, I think. Advocacy groups like the IEEE would most likely be all over this due to the weightly ramifications that would arise from Nintendo setting a new unfavorable legal precedent.
- dncornholio 3y agoValve pro-actively contact Nintendo. They pre-emptively took Nintendo's side. Not sure what to think of that. Don't think Valve will ever allow them on their platform.
- kevincox 3y agoI don't think I can blame Valve much for this. They aren't so much taking Nintendo's side as trying to avoid shoveling money into a fire. They know Nintendo's reputation for waging expensive and often frivolous lawsuits and don't want to be on the receiving end. So their options are basically 1. put it up then take it down 3 days later when Nintendo sends them some bullshit or 2. ask nicely first in case there is a small chance that Nintendo is feeling nice today. Sure, it was obvious that 2 wasn't going to work. But maybe it is still better to shut this down before launch rather than 3 days later with extra disappointment after lots of work has been done. We should blame the legal system that Nintendo is using to bully others.
- nfriedly 3y agoNintendo's been a bully for years, so their response doesn't surprise me at all. But I am disappointed in Valve and their handling of things.
- pjmlp 3y agoDespite what the FOSS crowd likes to think, Valve only cares about what brings money to their store front. Likewise SteamOS isn't some kind of freedom fight, rather not wanting to lose revenue for Microsoft.
- zamalek 3y agoBut Valve does understand (somewhat uniquely) that doing best by the consumer tends to bring in more money - Gabe often talks about this himself. I guess this is one instance where they think more money could be had another way.
- mrguyorama 3y agoAnd yet they resisted a way to refund games for like a decade until the Australian courts pointed out how illegal that was basically everywhere but the US and they finally conceded. Valve isn't "pro-consumer", but just "less anti-consumer" because it's a terribly low bar. They pull in insane money from skins and stupid skin trades on their marketplace and basically invented the gacha mechanics for Team Fortress Hats and crates, including making it free to play to bring in more people for the whales to lord over.
- zamalek 3y ago> more people for the whales to lord over. With purely cosmetic skins?
- johnnyanmac 3y ago>But Valve does understand (somewhat uniquely) that doing best by the consumer tends to bring in more money And they do a good job with their PR pretending they back that statement. They simply know to only pick fights with the little guys, in private, to keep that facade up.
- jaimex2 3y agoI hear Epic Store have an appetite for legal fights.
- cyber_kinetist 3y ago…if it ultimately profits them. This doesn’t, so I do not think they will be motivated to fight Nintendo for this at all.
- dangus 3y agoThey should have never tried. They’re poking the bear. Projects like this that are legal but in the crosshairs of massive corporations need to keep things a little bit less mainstream and on the down low so to speak. A company like Nintendo doesn’t have to get laws changed to shut you down. They can bury you in lawsuits and threats.
- postmortembees 3y ago[flagged]
- jdiff 3y agoIf they have the legal right why shouldn't they? Why should corporations be allowed to dictate what the general public does?
- wasabinator 3y agoI don't understand how the world seems full of Nintendo apologists. Not in this discussion, I mean across the greater web. They seem to get churned out of the same factory that produces the Apple apologists.
- hbn 3y agoI'm not sure I've ever seen someone who's an apologist for Nintendo's constant C&D requests. If you're talking about their games, then... yeah I mean they're basically the only AAA studio that's put out pretty reliably high quality games for the past 30-40 years. People want to play fun games and Nintendo provides them. Just like how people like Apple because they make good computers, phones, etc. We don't all make our tech purchases based on protesting the company's usage of US legal system.
- jeroenhd 3y agoThey're not usually here, but they're on so many other websites. Often parroting the "emulators are illegal" nonsense Nintendo puts out. Whenever Nintendo hits the news, the fanboys seem to be all the comment sections.
- phendrenad2 3y agoApple and Nintendo "apologists" are cut from the same cloth: they're people who understand how business works and reject notions of having one's cake and eating it too. Personally I hope we get more of these people in the future.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoSame people as the Valve fanboys. If you like something you'll blind yourself to the red flags. It's practically human nature. See here how people are upset that Valve more or less didn't pick a fight over this for what would 100% be a moral/ethical debate. Meanwhile we see how Epic tried this 5 years ago and they became the internet's worst enemy. All a matter of PR.
- _ea1k 3y agoThis is why I hate walled gardens. But for some reason the majority here seem to love them, at least when Apple is the wall builder. :shrug
- dagmx 3y agoBut there’s no walled garden here. You can still get and install Dolphin without Steam. You can’t compel Valve to host something they don’t want but that also isn’t an impediment to distribution on any platform that Steam is on.
- _ea1k 3y agoFair point. I was speaking more generally. I do like steam. It is a walled garden that can be exited whenever one chooses, and exiting is trivial but also requires deliberate action. That's good. :)
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI'd say Valve is a walled garden. You can't exactly take your games and put them up somewhere else after all. I think the parent comment thought it was more strage how so many people were upset that this couldn't be submitted to said walled garden. They actively want to wall themselves further.
- jrmg 3y agoI find it weird that no-one is focusing on the last paragraph of the letter: The technological measures on Nintendo's consoles and games are essential for Nintendo to protect its intellectual property from piracy. When those measures are circumvented, Nintendo and third-party game developers suffer tremendous harm because, for example, individuals can then use the emulator to play pirated games. Other commercial platforms have recognized these concerns and. as an example. We understand Microsoft recently took various emulators - including Dolphin - off its Xbox Store This isn’t an argument about interoperation, it’s an argument about piracy. In my experience, though there is a lot of lip-service about ‘only playing games you own’, the vast majority of emulator users are playing pirated games they don’t own. This would be a different argument if it was about literally playing Wii discs directly. [Personally I believe that the copyright terms in computer software like this are way too long, and much (most?) Wii software is really abandonware at this point, and should be allowed to be distributed - but that’s not the law]
- headline 3y agoThe problem is that Nintendo likes to play victim to piracy, surprising considering how their abandoned titles are kept alive by great folks who are only breathing new life into games that would otherwise be lost to time.
- detuned 3y agoAn especially egregious fact is that Nintendo uses open source emulators themselves and have re released & sold some older games that are just the emulator bundled with the game, in some cases inheriting emulator-only bugs. The most recent example I can think of is that the most recent Pikmin release includes dolphin and can therefore be played on a PC with no modification.
- tredre3 3y ago> An especially egregious fact is that Nintendo uses open source emulators themselves [...] the most recent Pikmin That's not true. Pikmin uses Hagi, which is Nintendo's own emulator. Nintendo never used an open-source emulator in a release product. See this fellow confused guy's thread: https://gbatemp.net/threads/pikmin-1-2-use-dolphin-emulator.635138/ https://gbatemp.net/threads/pikmin-1-2-use-dolphin-emulator....
- hospitalJail 3y agoI admit I have a mental illness in favor of Nintendo, specifically Zelda. I believe it happened in childhood, the relentless marketing/hype around the games growing up, the magazines that promoted it, the guides needed to 100% it, etc... I hate Zelda today, but I have a compulsion to play all of them. I don't enjoy it, I think the games are borderline bad quality. I must play. According to chatGPT this is likely some FOMO or desperation to achieve nolstaiga. I have such ill will toward Nintendo that I can't really have a conversation about it. They have extracted so much money from me. Go emulators. Go team.
- sam0x17 3y agoCould have been a really good opportunity for Valve to take a stance here. Shame.
- UnixSchizoid 3y agoAs soon as I saw this was put on the steam store I knew it was a matter of time until it was removed. Im surprised that Retro Arch has been on the store this long, probably because it doesn’t have any emulator cores for modern systems
- headline 3y agoI'd really like to live in the timeline where Valve pushed it anyway and entertained a legal battle against Nintendo to keep emulators on the foreground of gaming.
- tetha 3y ago> 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. This is something I've learned by now in the corporate and contract world. Companies and lawyers tend to bluff and fish first. If you have beef with another party and they have a lawyer send you a letter, you will most likely be threatened with everything theoretically possible. Everything will always be jail time, millions of dollars, years you cannot work on this, and you have to give away your favorite potted plant as well. In many, many cases, /any/ pushback from (even seemingly) legal support reduces this to more reasonable terms. Even just a confirmation of receipt from a lawyer results in interesting reactions.