Well that blew up, huh? If you follow emulation or just gaming on the whole, you've probably heard about the controversy around the Dolphin Steam release and the Wii Common Key. There's been a lot of conclusions made, and while we've wanted to defend ourselves, we thought it would be prudent to contact lawyers first to make sure that our understanding of the situation was legally sound. That took some time, which was frustrating to ourselves and to our users, but now we are educated and ready to give an informed response.
We have a very strong argument that Dolphin is not primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing protection. Dolphin is designed to recreate the GameCube and Wii hardware as software, and to provide the means for a user to interact with this emulated environment. Only an incredibly tiny portion of our code is actually related to circumvention.
That doesn’t sound like a strong argument to me. I’m a supporter of emulation but I think that the amount of code involved in making it happen doesn’t stop it from being the primary purpose.
I agree those arguments have no legal ground, but I don’t believe emulators are made with the primary purpose of circumventing protections, it’s just naive to think people wouldn’t use them for that purpose IMO.
what’s being circumvented here is the encryption of Wii games. the primary purpose of Dolphin is not to decrypt Wii games, it is to emulate them (in other words, make them interoperable with PC hardware, as pointed out later). the circumvention of encryption is a necessary part of emulation, but it’s not the primary purpose.
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That doesn’t sound like a strong argument to me. I’m a supporter of emulation but I think that the amount of code involved in making it happen doesn’t stop it from being the primary purpose.
I agree those arguments have no legal ground, but I don’t believe emulators are made with the primary purpose of circumventing protections, it’s just naive to think people wouldn’t use them for that purpose IMO.
what’s being circumvented here is the encryption of Wii games. the primary purpose of Dolphin is not to decrypt Wii games, it is to emulate them (in other words, make them interoperable with PC hardware, as pointed out later). the circumvention of encryption is a necessary part of emulation, but it’s not the primary purpose.
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The DMCA explicitly carves out emulation. What do you think “interoperability” means?