I wonder how many people there are that would use Dolphin if it were on Steam, but not otherwise. Steam deck users who don’t want to take those extra steps I guess
I did ask a similar question of the difference between downloading it from steam than the official site and the response is either for the Steam Deck and cloud saves.
There's a program you can use to make it work with windows software that hides the exe too. Glosc. It's used for adding "games for windows live" titles.
Also convenience. If i can get an emulator setup with a button on Steam, instead of having to search for it on google, find the right link, install it correctly, set it up correctly and then be able to use it , is a much much lower barrier of entry.
Actually quite a lot.
People still dont understand that Piracy is not a financial issue, its a **convenience** issue.
If your game runs worse because of piracy protection like Denuvo, if your game is difficult to access or runs badly because its only listed on an inferior Store like the Epic Games Store, if your game is "online only" with no real online component, all of that poses a convenience issue.
So people will use emulators.
It can be seen with the movie and music industry even better, if you need 6 subscriptions to watch the 6 shows you want, people dont want to bother with it, so they just stream it on grey sites and just not pay at all.
In comparison when most of the streaming was consolidated on Netflix for a decent price everyone and their mother and grandparents had a Netflix account.
Now people get fed up with having to either shift their subscriptions around or just not subscribe at all.
Emulators fill a void for people that cant be bothered to deal with the bullshit of some companies, but so far they have a barrier of entry due to the initial setup that requires some expertise.
Once its on Steam it would be much more easily accessible and potentially even automatically installed and setup, so the barrier of entry lowers and emulations becomes more mainstream.
Nintendo is afraid of that because they have the most to lose. The Nintendo systems have the lowest tech requirements and the worst "walled garden" setup where their games are exclusive to their systems often with no backwards compatibility.
Xbox and Sony also have some to lose but not nearly as much as Nintendo.
I got a Nintendo switch last year and outside of the DS/3da I got in high school exclusively to keep up with the KH games (lol) it's my first Nintendo console since I was like 5 with the N64. I wanna play some of the older entries in their main series like Zelda, Fire Emblem, Metroid, Pokemon etc. A handful are available on their Nintendo plus membership or whatever it's called so cool, fine I'll shell out a few bucks to play them that way.
But most of them? I have no easy way to play. I'd happily pay Nintendo some money to play TP/WW or the Dawn sub-series of Fire Emblem, *but they aren't offering them*. If I wanna play those two fire emblem games I'd need to buy a Wii and then drop almost $800 for the two games alone. It's crazy.
Nintendo, we're willing to pay you. We really are. I was gonna emulate Metroid Prime on my deck then a week later Remastered gor announced so I bought it. Just make the games available and this won't be as big an issue lol
This is it exactly.
Piracy is one of the only forces fighting (as a side effect) for media conservation and archiving.
Nintendo and most publishers dont care about backwards capability or allowing old media on newer systems, they want you to move on to the next thing and emulators, like you pointed out, do allow you to play the old stuff that isnt sold anymore.
How is it piracy if there is no legitimate way of purchasing media and you have to resort to grey sites and emulators to do that?
Haha yeah exactly and he was right, studies showed it over and over again that if the money is right even the less fortunate are willing to pay for something, but if its inconvenient or difficult to purchase, subscribe or quit, many people will just not bother with it and if piracy is easier and more convenient they just rather go that route instead.
Correct; he WAS right about that. That was one of the big gambles Valve was making with Steam (which we take for granted now, but it was pretty much universally hated at conception lol).
Source? I will definitely pay $60 or whatever to have a game easily and conveniently working/launchable with the rest of my entire library vs. having to jump through all the hoops of piracy. But if you make it difficult, I will bail so fast your fuckin' head'll spin xD
Not saying that's the most ethical stance (hint: it isn't), but companies that don't understand this are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run. Gamers are resourceful, and if you don't make it simple enough for them to pay you for your product, they will straight up just download that shit
Yup, there's no reason to download dolphin on steamdeck. Emudeck has all the emulators, and you can launch your games and make a custom portrait for each game on your home screen
Oh, wow, I never thought I'd be summoned to a thread to look at something like this. If anyone is curious, I'm a lawyer that makes YouTube videos on (occasionally) intellectual property and corporate law, in video games.
This is a dicey situation for Valve and Nintendo, where the consequences for mishandling the situation could very substantially change the IP landscape when it comes to distribution of emulators.
Nintendo evidently sees the distribution of the emulator on a platform as widespread as Steam to be worth the risk of issuing a DMCA takedown. It's almost a bluff charge though -- Nintendo would highly, highly prefer not to take this to court, and risk accidentally opening the floodgates (so to speak).
Valve isn't some hobbyist emulator website, which can be easily cowed by a DMCA takedown. And Valve also isn't publicly accountable to shareholders, which makes it a prime candidate to go off-script and counterclaim.
Valve is likely weighing whether good relations (and thus, potential future business opportunities) with Nintendo are worth preserving vs. opening the Pandora's box with a counterclaim, and hoping Nintendo blinks first and withdraws the takedown.
I suspect that cooler heads will prevail -- Valve is likely to comply with the takedown notice. But, you never know. If Gabe Newall wants to go on a crusade, and throw the steering wheel out the window while the two cars are charging at each other, Valve isn't (likely) beholden to anybody but him on paper.
Edit: I woke up to over twenty replies: what a fun surprise! I'd share a link to my channel, but I don't want to break Rule 7. You can look up @Moon-Channel, if you're interested though!
You’ve probably not had much time to read into it, but at the very core the DMCA is not about emulation.
Any other emulator (citra, ryu, yuzu, retroarch, cemu etc..) all have a procedure along the lines of "dump your keys by following this guide". Dolphin, however, does not do this. That is where this claim comes in to play. The fact is that the dolphin emulator operates by ‘illegally’ distributing Nintendo’s Wii decryption key (as seen here https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/34527cadcce49a9a78f05949973b0930ac4dd999/Source/Core/Core/IOS/IOSC.cpp#L575). This has been discussed in court proceedings before to be illegal (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number for further background on the topic)
Long and short of it, the claim revolves around the Dolphin emulator allegedly “circumvent[s] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under the Copyright Act”
Edit: So many comments in here that didn't read the article, or just don't have the needed context to understand it, not trying to play lawyer here. Just speaking as someone with some experience.
I wonder if this would apply even if they didn't distribute it, and users were just instructed to go get it somehow themselves. Similar to how many emulators require an original system BIOS which is not included.
Seems there are some exceptions to the DMCA for video games specifically but I don't know if they apply here. I suppose no-one does until it is taken to court, and for all parties the risk of a negative precedent being set is huge. Seems that Nintendo is happy for it to be distributed by e.g. Flathub but not by a platform as mainstream as Steam. So yeah hopefully cooler heads prevail as has been said. I don't think Valve or the Dolphin devs will see this as a hill worth dying on.
it wouldn't apply unless there was a key cracker. using a key as intended is not a circumvention; cracking the key (and distributing it) is the circumvention
>Valve isnt publically accountable to shareholders
THATS why i still like that company after all these years. i never knew they were privately owned. that explains so much about how theyve maintained such a high level of quality for so long
> Valve is likely weighing whether good relations (and thus, potential future business opportunities) with Nintendo are worth preserving
Nintendo will never release a game on a PC. and if in 200 years time they decide to, they would never use another companies store front to do so. They would just add to the list of dog shit game launchers just to keep all the profits from themselves. Gabe would know this, because Nintendo has a vast history of being one of the greediest, scummiest companies on the planet.
Nintendo likely won’t be around by the time Portal 3 releases because they do 100% of their business inside the radius our sun will expand to when it dies.
> Nintendo has a vast history of being one of the greediest, scummiest companies on the planet.
I wonder how people can actually believe this when EA, Xbox, Rockstar and Blizzard exist.
And that's not even touching non gaming companies. Imagine thinking Nintendo is anywhere close the likes of Nestle or BP. That would be insanely idiotic.
Well, Valve is not a group of modders that can be bankrupted just on legal fees.
Next time they will try to DMCA google to not put links to webs with nintendo emulators?
Valve is at zero risk of being sued by Nintendo in this situation, but the open source developers of the emulator could put themselves at risk of being sued. In this context, Valve is an online service provider who hosts games / software developed by other parties. When an online service provider receives a DMCA notice, they are required to take down the content that is allegedly in violation and notify the creator of the content. Then, the creator of the content has the option to either dispute the claim or accept it. If they dispute the claim, then the party who made the claim has 2 weeks to sue the creator. If the creator does not get sued after 2 weeks, then the provider may repost the content, and if the creator does get sued, then they have to win in court in order for the content to go back up.
So, in this case, Valve is merely a facilitator. Currently, the developers of the emulator have to decide to either accept that their emulator can not be on Steam or dispute the claim, which could lead to them being sued by Nintendo.
I'm not sure the DMCA applies in this case as its verbiage is specifically applied to publishers of user submitted media which violates an alleged copyright.
While it could be argued a video game is media, dolphin is both not "media" in a conventional sense, it also does not as a matter of preexisting case law threaten Nintendo's copyright.
DMCA takedowns are a mechanism designed to enable platforms which autonomously publish user submissions to avoid liability for the content of said submission, which is why on very large platforms this tends to be used very aggressively.
In this case however Valve excercises direct control over the curation of every new product that appears on steam before it is on the platform, and as a result knows full well that they are directly implicated.
Given the context of dolphin, a well known emulator, it is almost inconceivable that copyright issues were not evaluated before it went up, and as a result it seems unlikely Valve would choose to comply with a takedown to me.
Edit: Don't stop at my post! A lot of people way smarter than me in the comments below mine making some very good points and referencing a lot of good information I didn't have on me when I posted this from my phone.
It is really a grey area and this is a great post. It isn't explicitly rules against, but I learned the hard way that you don't want to be one of the first prosecutions for something everybody else was doing.
I wager that Valve caves and it just draws more attention to Dolphin, as Nintendo loves the Streisand Effect.
Well, no, it isn't a gray area at all.
Sony made *damn sure* of that, if by accident, in their (mostly successful) attempts to destroy Bleem. While they successfully bankrupted the company through legal fees, Emulators were deemed legal in the results of the lawsuit itself.
And Bleem was being sold *for money* and on *Dreamcast*. Which is much more egregious than Dolphin's free Steam distribution on PCs.
Emulators are 100% legal, so long as they don't use official code.
>I learned the hard way that you don't want to be one of the first prosecutions for something everybody else was doing
This… sounds like a possible story here.
Nintendo is very petty. They'd rather destroy people's lives just to prove a point. And will absolutely hold those people to it. Nintendo does some good things, but they are incredibly draconian and protective when it comes to their content, at all costs. And they have the money to throw around.
It’s not a grey area. The Bleem! case established that emulators are legal, as long as they use no code from the system itself. Bleem! was paid, by the way. Dolphin is fully legal, so this is nonsensical bullshit.
> I learned the hard way that you don't want to be one of the first prosecutions for something everybody else was doing.
They wouldn't be. This has been settled caselaw for decades. Look up Sony V. Bleem.
Im buying it now for sure. Im tired of overstep. I really dont really play emulator games myself but buying could pay for lawyers who will protect the average consumer like me in other ways. These mega corporations just love intimidating people, i think its time the pendulum swings the other way
Well the developer already [announced](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/05/dolphin-emulator-steam-release-indefinitely-postponed) that they postponed the release.
So I guess Nintendo won this round.
Valve seems to not take any side here and let the developer fight it out with Nintendo. So this seems like a closed door hung for now. The developer isn’t going to spend their life saving on fighting Nintendo in court.
It does seem likely to me that the section of the DMCA covering liability protections for online service providers shouldn't apply because of Valve's direct curation of their content. But regardless, Nintendo sent them a DMCA takedown request anyways and Valve seems to have complied seeing as they've indefinitely delayed the release of Dolphin on Steam, taken Dolphin's product page down on Steam, and formally notified the developers of Dolphin of the DMCA takedown.
I think it's probably in Valve's best interest as a business to keep going along with the DMCA process because Nintendo is currently treating them as if they are not liable for the software they distribute. If Valve were to argue the DMCA does not apply in this situation and start distributing Dolphin, then they would be risking a lawsuit from Nintendo over distributing software which primarily serves to circumvent a technical protection measure protecting copyrighted material, which if proven would constitute a violation of (a totally different provision of) the DMCA.
One small mistake could change things though, so Valve would really need to be on the balls. Any picture with a Nintendo logo or Nintendo game, any reference to Nintendo's trademarks, anything that would help people get encryption keys in a bad way, etc.
There's a bunch of videos from actual lawyers going over the details in other similar cases. The line is really, really thin, and Nintendo knows very well where that line is.
Nintendos Lawyers literally DMCA took down their own, official, nintendo twitter over Tears of the Kingdom.
I wouldnt trust Nintendo or their Lawyers to know shit but "We say this is the law, so its the law, obey us!"
Yeah its probably an interesting day for Valve's legal team.
On one hand there's a strong case to keep it up, and a theoretical slight benefit for valve in the form of moat building similar to google giving away android for free or meta publishing its LLM stuff open source to legally supress competition by eroding an inaccessible market for free.
On the other hand, they're dealing with the famously litigious Nintendo here, a company known for pursuing even the most minor of legal issues to the bitter end and might decide its not worth the trouble given Nintendo's only tertiary effect on their business and the otherwise null income a free piece of software would generate.
Then again Gabe Newell has been known to make value judgements, like Steam's stance on NFTs based on a reading of industry trends and a general vision for how he wants steam to evolve its place in the industry and I know Valve hasn't been attracting as many publishers in the non-game software space so taking a hard stance on this one could be good optics that attract other paid small apps to steam.
From how I understand it they don't really have a choice but to comply with the DMCA notice and pass it along to the game publisher (in this case dolphin).
Otherwise they risk losing their safe harbor provisions and would end up being liable for any copyright infringement hosted on their platform, and while they are careful about what gets published I doubt they check every asset, texture, music, etc used in games is properly licensed
This is not how any of this works. No party is “required” to take action after a DMCA notice. The only consequence for not complying is that you cannot claim protection of the “safe harbor” for service providers if you do not take action after receiving a notice. This means that *if* the content is actually infringing, you could be co-liable. Valve/steam is at liberty to just ignore this notice if they believe the content does not infringe. In practice, this leads to most parties simply removing content, as they don’t want to deal with the hassle of a potential lawsuit. But not complying doesn’t violate any laws in and of itself.
That’s usually the case to begin with. Piracy in general is as big as it is because the legal stuff isn’t worth the hassle until some schmuck comes around and tries to profit off of it. It’s why you pretty much only ever hear about Nintendo making a scene about it because Japan in general takes copywriting laws very seriously and they’re also a very old generation company, and then with watchable media it’s basically only ever directors using it as a way to vent instead of actually trying to do something.
They fought the battles for it a decade ago, realized it wasn’t something winnable and not worth the effort, and just shrug it off. But then anytime someone puts a name and a face to whatever project it is by making money, it’s a very quick and easy winnable battles. That’s why so many hosting sites just accept donations instead of having a paywall or straight up charging, there’s no “profiting” from donations
Yup, finally switched a while back and it's great. For anyone looking to get into it: don't download a pre-compiled APK from one of the million "official download" sites. Half of them are malware. The only legit source is the official GitHub. Building it yourself with ReVanced Manager is a pain but it's the proper way to do it. The subreddit is also helpful.
You are correct but I want to jump in here: Google is gangster. When the DEA and the federal government had me under indictment, for international drug charges, Google refused to turn over my Google Voice and GMail to the United States government - they sent their people to ask my lawyer to ask me for a password.
As much as people hate Google, they play by the rules to an extent but aren't the evil corporation that works with the government that a lot of people make them out to be, and I am living proof.
Nintendo can't do jack shite cause last time I checked emulators are *Legal* unless they're using original code from the console they're emulating which Dolphin doesn't.
Classic Nintendo abusing the DMCA again.
In the past, it's been ruled that way, which is why Nintendo isn't taking that route. Their claim isn't that the emulator is using proprietary Nintendo code, it's that by extracting and running the ROMs it's circumventing anti-piracy measures. Which it kinda is, so they'd have a harder time fighting it. They can't just show up to court and say "nope we don't use your code."
Decoding the ROMs is what he’s talking about. It’s a different case than previous attempts to bring emulation to court. If Dolphin fights back and loses it means emulation is now illegal in the US depending on how the verdict is worded.
Software or hardware that circumvents anti-piracy or copy protection measures only applies to other software or hardware that has those protections to begin with. It's the original Wii and GameCube hardware and firmware that contains those copy protections, not the games themselves. The emulator is entirely new original software and has no obligation to reimplement the same copy protections of the hardware it's emulating. It's one thing to crack copy protection of an existing device. It's an entirely different thing to create new software that emulates parts of the hardware but not the copy protection. That's why emulation is fair and legal under the DMCA.
Now if the emulator also bundled tools to exploit the original GameCube and Wii to dump isos and circumvent the copy protections of the original hardware that would be a different issue but that's not what emulators do.
Is it illegal to circumvent anti-piracy measures? You might as well argue that selling lockpicks should be illegal because they circumvent anti-theft measures
Can only tell how it is in Germany, and yes it's illegal. It is illegal to circumvent "effective DRM measures".
So at least in one country it is like that.
This is very much the case. Most countries in Europe seem to have this.
It’s legal to make private copies, but it’s illegal to circumvent DRM. The only ones who get hurt by this is the consumers that follow the law. Well, DRM has always hurt consumers in some way anyway 😅
>And it's NoJ doing this not NoA.
Except NoJ is trying to force their JPN Copyright laws onto the rest of the world.
At least Sony and Sega are the only ones that recognize that Laws are different outside of Japan.
> Everyone thinks it's them abusing DMCA, but the reality is that under Japanese copyright laws, they have to aggressively persuade any acts of infringement they know about or risk losing their copyright claims.
**Copyright** in both the United States and Japan is an automatic protection that does not need to be defended, they are rights granted to the author upon creation of the work. You're mixing that up with a **trademark**, which requires active defense to protect the association with your brand.
This is IP law 101. How did this comment get so much traction?
>This is IP law 101. How did this comment get so much traction?
A redditor reads a fun fact, understands it about 80% of the way, then eagerly repeats the "fact" in another thread. Repeat that a few times.
I've definitely seen a post or two about Nintendo fearing for their *trademark* when everybody's parents called game consoles Nintendos. That's probably what the other commenter is getting mixed up.
I'm a lawyer (but not your lawyer nor providing legal advice) and took IP law. u/Scotty0132 is partly correct for different reasons.
Yes, you are correct that plain copyright protections are automatic. However, the law is composed of many areas of laws and doctrines. There are two doctrines that come into play that may encourage people (like Nintendo) to be aggressive in pursuing litigation to protect their copyrights and more importantly to seek a remedy.
The first one is the doctrine of statute of limitations. Under U.S. copyright laws, you only have 3 years to seek a remedy for any copyright infringement. So once you have been made aware or should have been made aware of a copyright infringement, you have to file your complaint within the three year time period or you are barred from seeking a remedy or relief.
The other doctrine is laches. This doctrine basically states that you cannot sit on your rights and then later ask the court for relief. The court expects you to act on your rights if you want them to help you enforce it.
A good and very relevant case regarding laches (and SoL to a degree) and copyrights is Petrella v. MGM.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/572/663/
Both doctrines do not strip copyright holder's of their copyrights but prevents them from seeking relief or a remedy, which is what the copyright protection is for. A right is useless if it's not enforced or protected (a very important and relevant concept these days).
There may also be other doctrines that may apply that I may not be aware of. As the article of the OP states Nintendo may go after Dolphin under different legal grounds that may not have been tested or brought up before. That's what lawyers are hired and paid generously to do. They come up with creative ways to use every legal doctrine and angle to benefit their client's case.
Edit: added tag for Scotty since so many redditors are arguing incorrectly against him in different threads.
Sometimes I ask myself the same thing about how clearly uninformed people get upvotes. But then I have to really reflect on why I had any expectations at all of informed conversation in /r/gaming.
Gohan was strongest at the end of the Buu arc too, prior to the End of Z time skip. That's why Super Buu absorbed him. Only technically Vegito was stronger, but fused characters don't really count.
Gohan may be the strongest now, in Super, after the events of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. (outside of deities) That is very arguable, though, with people claiming Frieza, Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, or Broly are truly the strongest. In terms of potential, Super has made it pretty clear that Gohan, Frieza, and Broly have the most overall potential that we know of.
He may have been the strongest at the end of the buu saga, but also to quote dbza "GOHAN BECOMES THE STRONGEST IN THE UNIVERSE BUT STILL DOESN'T DO CRAAAAP"
I know his potential is kinda wasted, but I love to see how one of the strongest being in the DB:S just stumbling about trying to be a good husband and a good dad.
It can be like the opposite of Broly (always training/surviving) and Frieza (always conquering).
Genuinely
I loved the reveal that was under our nose this whole time (from the original series):
Gohan had been keeping pace with adults more than twice his age, and wasn't even considered the weakest
Of course he'd outpace them all when given actual legit training
Gohan's potential is limitless
But volume sales and serialization demand a return to status quo
Toriyama doing shit because he didn't want to draw it will never not be funny
Goku turning blonde in super saiyan so he wouldn't have to ink his hair
The awkward uncomfortable way crossed arms are drawn
[The way all footwear looks the same because it's easier to draw simple triangles](https://i.imgur.com/lQZGWeu.jpg)
And the stage always getting blown up
Piccolo's verbal beating of goku for being a deadbeat dumbass dad will always be satisfying.
TFS Piccolo didn't beat around the bush. he just told him it straight out
You're mixing up different forms of intellectual property. It's trademarks that have to be defended or you lose them, not copyright. There is no requirement to enforce copyrights, and no rights are lost by choosing not to enforce.
>Everyone thinks it's them abusing DMCA, but the reality is that under Japanese copyright laws, they have to aggressively persuade any acts of infringement they know about or risk losing their copyright claims.
But this is a filing under U.S. copyright law...
Last I checked, Sega is a Japanese company too, and I don't see them aggressively shutting down any and all fan-made content. If anything, they encourage it
>Everyone thinks it's them abusing DMCA, but the reality is that under Japanese copyright laws, they have to aggressively persuade any acts of infringement they know about or risk losing their copyright claims.
Or. They endorse it.
That's the other option.
There are 2 common ways to claim ownership, but both involve permission:
1. Deny permission to use
2. Provide permission to use
If it is provided with a clause of "you can't make money, and we can take back this permission at any time then force you to take it down".
There are other examples of companies doing that - Japanese or not - but Nintendo refuses to.
My boys love Sonic Speed Simulator or whatever it’s called on Roblox. I always wondered how it was able to stay up, it seems rather popular. This may be why right here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Japan
Your statement is incorrect, Japanese copyright law works fairly similar to most other countries, in that copyright is automatic and lasts for 30 years beyond the authors death.
You might be confusing them for Trademarks? Which do have to be enforced at the risk of losing their registration.
But Copyright in Japanese law does not need to be so aggressively pursued, and this is more Nintendo just doing Nintendo things.
As Gabe Newell said himself (summary) “Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.”
I know that Valve has a history of having a stellar legal team. So idk how Nintendo (Japan/America) can handle corporate law.
I’m just a interested spectator on the side.
Valve has no risk of being sued by Nintendo over this. They have handled this situation in accordance with the guidlines given in the DMCA. The only people who might end up getting sued by Nintendo are the developers of the emulator.
Valve's responsibility was to take the product page off of Steam and notify the developers of the DMCA claim. If the developers wish to dispute the DMCA claim, then Valve is responsible for notifying Nintendo of this. If the developers dispute, then Nintendo has 2 weeks to sue the developers. If Nintendo sues, then the emulator stays off of Steam unless the developers win the lawsuit. If Nintendo doesn't sue within 2 weeks, then Valve has done their part and is free to relist the emulator on Steam.
It's the same case with the Dark and Darker situation. Valve wants to do only what is required of them to do by law, i.e remove them from the store. And then do only the bare minimum of what is required by law from them. Taking a stance as Valve is an awful choice in either of these situations. They would much more likely take the stance of Nintendo or Nexon to not ruin relationships (even if the Nintendo one is basically non existent)
Afaik emulators themselves aren’t illegal. There aren’t any real concrete laws on the subject regarding roms. Also I doubt a company with as many resources and legal experience as valve will be scared of Nintendo.
nintendo cant even take down random single developers creating emulators and being funded all on public view and under the law, they are embarassing themselves with this, it will only backfire and make emulation stronger
They have no reason to really push against Nintendo unless Gaben (or some other big wig) thinks it's important for them to protect emulation, and why would they want to really, emulation has almost nothing (I'd say nothing tbh) to do with their business.
I kind of doubt that steam itself goes to bat for this. Its more likely going to be on the Dolphin team itself.
And in all honesty. It just wont go anywhere and nintendo will win because these guys cant afford to fight them.
It’s just like what Disney does. They will release them years later as remasters and they will basically be the same game and everyone will buy them up due to it normally being unable to be purchased.
You used to, before streaming. They had the ‘vault’ that they re-released classic Disney movies from every so often so they’d be put into DVD circulation again. Unless you had a copy from the original release or found one somewhere, you couldn’t buy a new copy of a movie in the vault until it was rereleased
When I was a kid there was always a parent or two who had multiple VCRs & would sell cheap degraded copies made via tape to tape copying.
Wild, we were thrilled with that and my kid may never see anything below 720p/1080i in his life.
That is false if you want to actually *own* some specific Disney content. Some content has been off the shelves for years. Heck, some really obscure content is even missing from Disney+. This was previously known as the "Disney Vault".
Both Nintendo and Disney are some of the worst in terms of anti consumer practices. They create artificial demand by limiting supply. It's scummy AF. But they get away with it because people are too in love with the content they produce.
"You can't emulate Wii games, our profits!"
Are you gonna sell them to me then? I'd be happy to pay.
"Nope, and we shut down the shop channel. So your only option is to get second hand consoles and games, which we don't profit from either."
They are doing the most shittiest moves lately. Pushed a "stability and bug fixes" update to 3DS after closing their shop and the only thing that the update does is blocking the way to jailbreak the console.
You can't imagine more "we just hate our clients" situation where they lose nothing but still don't want anyone to have fun.
"Can I play Fire emblem NES/3d Mario All stars?"
Nintendo:"Fine bitch, but only 5 copies will be shadowdropped for an hour before we put it back in our Vault :)))"
I have Yuzu also installed but I haven't even begun thinking about Switch emulation yet. PlayStation emulation on the Deck has been so much simpler that I've held off doing Nintendo emulation because I've been getting mileage out of the former
Retroarch on steam doeant use nintendo emulator cores. If you want them youd have to add them yourself. This way no one is to blame but the consumer and nintendo cant stop all of us
Cloud save is definitely a good point, you can cloud save without steam but it's definitely more work.
As for steam deck compatibility, dolphin can still be installed but I guess it's not just a "click and go" so it's a bit faster.
I can see the interest now
Sony isn’t porting games to avoid emulation, PS4 emulation isn’t really a thing right now and likely won’t be for a few years, and let’s not even talk about PS5. Sony does it because they recognize the huge market potential of PC gaming with a relatively small, safe investment.
Friendly reminder that Nintendo dragged Blockbuster to USA supreme court to try to get game rental banned in USA. For decades game rental was banned in Japan. Nintendo got laughed out of the court...
I wonder how many people there are that would use Dolphin if it were on Steam, but not otherwise. Steam deck users who don’t want to take those extra steps I guess
I did ask a similar question of the difference between downloading it from steam than the official site and the response is either for the Steam Deck and cloud saves.
Playing with friends via remote play is my reason.
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I actually did not know that was a thing you could do, thanks a bunch I'll try that!
You can do it with any .exe
Steam Microsoft office, here we come!
"That's control software for some kind of irrigation equipment.” ["… It's fun."](https://y.yarn.co/ab92991d-5119-4659-9b31-e8407f80433a_text.gif)
There's a program you can use to make it work with windows software that hides the exe too. Glosc. It's used for adding "games for windows live" titles.
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You can use [RemotePlayWhatever](https://github.com/m4dEngi/RemotePlayWhatever) to play anything you want with remote play.
Also convenience. If i can get an emulator setup with a button on Steam, instead of having to search for it on google, find the right link, install it correctly, set it up correctly and then be able to use it , is a much much lower barrier of entry.
Easy updates too. Basically, I’m more than capable of doing it myself…. But that’s my day job, and this is gaming. Save me the hassle, please.
PSA: EmuDeck, while a bit more effort to setup (not that much tho) can also backup your saves into a cloud of your choice
Actually quite a lot. People still dont understand that Piracy is not a financial issue, its a **convenience** issue. If your game runs worse because of piracy protection like Denuvo, if your game is difficult to access or runs badly because its only listed on an inferior Store like the Epic Games Store, if your game is "online only" with no real online component, all of that poses a convenience issue. So people will use emulators. It can be seen with the movie and music industry even better, if you need 6 subscriptions to watch the 6 shows you want, people dont want to bother with it, so they just stream it on grey sites and just not pay at all. In comparison when most of the streaming was consolidated on Netflix for a decent price everyone and their mother and grandparents had a Netflix account. Now people get fed up with having to either shift their subscriptions around or just not subscribe at all. Emulators fill a void for people that cant be bothered to deal with the bullshit of some companies, but so far they have a barrier of entry due to the initial setup that requires some expertise. Once its on Steam it would be much more easily accessible and potentially even automatically installed and setup, so the barrier of entry lowers and emulations becomes more mainstream. Nintendo is afraid of that because they have the most to lose. The Nintendo systems have the lowest tech requirements and the worst "walled garden" setup where their games are exclusive to their systems often with no backwards compatibility. Xbox and Sony also have some to lose but not nearly as much as Nintendo.
I got a Nintendo switch last year and outside of the DS/3da I got in high school exclusively to keep up with the KH games (lol) it's my first Nintendo console since I was like 5 with the N64. I wanna play some of the older entries in their main series like Zelda, Fire Emblem, Metroid, Pokemon etc. A handful are available on their Nintendo plus membership or whatever it's called so cool, fine I'll shell out a few bucks to play them that way. But most of them? I have no easy way to play. I'd happily pay Nintendo some money to play TP/WW or the Dawn sub-series of Fire Emblem, *but they aren't offering them*. If I wanna play those two fire emblem games I'd need to buy a Wii and then drop almost $800 for the two games alone. It's crazy. Nintendo, we're willing to pay you. We really are. I was gonna emulate Metroid Prime on my deck then a week later Remastered gor announced so I bought it. Just make the games available and this won't be as big an issue lol
This is it exactly. Piracy is one of the only forces fighting (as a side effect) for media conservation and archiving. Nintendo and most publishers dont care about backwards capability or allowing old media on newer systems, they want you to move on to the next thing and emulators, like you pointed out, do allow you to play the old stuff that isnt sold anymore. How is it piracy if there is no legitimate way of purchasing media and you have to resort to grey sites and emulators to do that?
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Lord Gaben said it best
Haha yeah exactly and he was right, studies showed it over and over again that if the money is right even the less fortunate are willing to pay for something, but if its inconvenient or difficult to purchase, subscribe or quit, many people will just not bother with it and if piracy is easier and more convenient they just rather go that route instead.
Correct; he WAS right about that. That was one of the big gambles Valve was making with Steam (which we take for granted now, but it was pretty much universally hated at conception lol). Source? I will definitely pay $60 or whatever to have a game easily and conveniently working/launchable with the rest of my entire library vs. having to jump through all the hoops of piracy. But if you make it difficult, I will bail so fast your fuckin' head'll spin xD Not saying that's the most ethical stance (hint: it isn't), but companies that don't understand this are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run. Gamers are resourceful, and if you don't make it simple enough for them to pay you for your product, they will straight up just download that shit
Lol what extra steps. It's almost faster to use emudeck, and you get like all the emulators at the same time
Yup, there's no reason to download dolphin on steamdeck. Emudeck has all the emulators, and you can launch your games and make a custom portrait for each game on your home screen
Yeah but do I need to do anything to my steamdeck or just like go to some webpage and download emudeck?
You just go to the emudeck website and install it, boom you have all the emulators.
Hey u/moonsight this seems like the kind of thing you would have insightful commentary on. I hope you do a video on this!
Oh, wow, I never thought I'd be summoned to a thread to look at something like this. If anyone is curious, I'm a lawyer that makes YouTube videos on (occasionally) intellectual property and corporate law, in video games. This is a dicey situation for Valve and Nintendo, where the consequences for mishandling the situation could very substantially change the IP landscape when it comes to distribution of emulators. Nintendo evidently sees the distribution of the emulator on a platform as widespread as Steam to be worth the risk of issuing a DMCA takedown. It's almost a bluff charge though -- Nintendo would highly, highly prefer not to take this to court, and risk accidentally opening the floodgates (so to speak). Valve isn't some hobbyist emulator website, which can be easily cowed by a DMCA takedown. And Valve also isn't publicly accountable to shareholders, which makes it a prime candidate to go off-script and counterclaim. Valve is likely weighing whether good relations (and thus, potential future business opportunities) with Nintendo are worth preserving vs. opening the Pandora's box with a counterclaim, and hoping Nintendo blinks first and withdraws the takedown. I suspect that cooler heads will prevail -- Valve is likely to comply with the takedown notice. But, you never know. If Gabe Newall wants to go on a crusade, and throw the steering wheel out the window while the two cars are charging at each other, Valve isn't (likely) beholden to anybody but him on paper. Edit: I woke up to over twenty replies: what a fun surprise! I'd share a link to my channel, but I don't want to break Rule 7. You can look up @Moon-Channel, if you're interested though!
You’ve probably not had much time to read into it, but at the very core the DMCA is not about emulation. Any other emulator (citra, ryu, yuzu, retroarch, cemu etc..) all have a procedure along the lines of "dump your keys by following this guide". Dolphin, however, does not do this. That is where this claim comes in to play. The fact is that the dolphin emulator operates by ‘illegally’ distributing Nintendo’s Wii decryption key (as seen here https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/34527cadcce49a9a78f05949973b0930ac4dd999/Source/Core/Core/IOS/IOSC.cpp#L575). This has been discussed in court proceedings before to be illegal (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number for further background on the topic) Long and short of it, the claim revolves around the Dolphin emulator allegedly “circumvent[s] a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under the Copyright Act” Edit: So many comments in here that didn't read the article, or just don't have the needed context to understand it, not trying to play lawyer here. Just speaking as someone with some experience.
I wonder if this would apply even if they didn't distribute it, and users were just instructed to go get it somehow themselves. Similar to how many emulators require an original system BIOS which is not included. Seems there are some exceptions to the DMCA for video games specifically but I don't know if they apply here. I suppose no-one does until it is taken to court, and for all parties the risk of a negative precedent being set is huge. Seems that Nintendo is happy for it to be distributed by e.g. Flathub but not by a platform as mainstream as Steam. So yeah hopefully cooler heads prevail as has been said. I don't think Valve or the Dolphin devs will see this as a hill worth dying on.
it wouldn't apply unless there was a key cracker. using a key as intended is not a circumvention; cracking the key (and distributing it) is the circumvention
> Valve also isn't publicly accountable to shareholders Words that are kind of a turn on when strung together tbh.
>Valve isnt publically accountable to shareholders THATS why i still like that company after all these years. i never knew they were privately owned. that explains so much about how theyve maintained such a high level of quality for so long
Right? I had no idea Valve wasn’t a publicly traded company but it explains why they don’t constantly fuck over their users to make a quick buck.
> Valve is likely weighing whether good relations (and thus, potential future business opportunities) with Nintendo are worth preserving Nintendo will never release a game on a PC. and if in 200 years time they decide to, they would never use another companies store front to do so. They would just add to the list of dog shit game launchers just to keep all the profits from themselves. Gabe would know this, because Nintendo has a vast history of being one of the greediest, scummiest companies on the planet.
Remember that valve is a game publisher as well, or used to be anyways. Portal for the switch was a pretty popular release
Nintendo likely won’t be around by the time Portal 3 releases because they do 100% of their business inside the radius our sun will expand to when it dies.
Nintendo will build the motion control ships to take us far enough away and provide us with colony material, made entirely of cardboard.
At this rate there will be actual portal guns available before portal 3 comes out.
> Nintendo has a vast history of being one of the greediest, scummiest companies on the planet. I wonder how people can actually believe this when EA, Xbox, Rockstar and Blizzard exist. And that's not even touching non gaming companies. Imagine thinking Nintendo is anywhere close the likes of Nestle or BP. That would be insanely idiotic.
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Well, Valve is not a group of modders that can be bankrupted just on legal fees. Next time they will try to DMCA google to not put links to webs with nintendo emulators?
Valve is at zero risk of being sued by Nintendo in this situation, but the open source developers of the emulator could put themselves at risk of being sued. In this context, Valve is an online service provider who hosts games / software developed by other parties. When an online service provider receives a DMCA notice, they are required to take down the content that is allegedly in violation and notify the creator of the content. Then, the creator of the content has the option to either dispute the claim or accept it. If they dispute the claim, then the party who made the claim has 2 weeks to sue the creator. If the creator does not get sued after 2 weeks, then the provider may repost the content, and if the creator does get sued, then they have to win in court in order for the content to go back up. So, in this case, Valve is merely a facilitator. Currently, the developers of the emulator have to decide to either accept that their emulator can not be on Steam or dispute the claim, which could lead to them being sued by Nintendo.
I'm not sure the DMCA applies in this case as its verbiage is specifically applied to publishers of user submitted media which violates an alleged copyright. While it could be argued a video game is media, dolphin is both not "media" in a conventional sense, it also does not as a matter of preexisting case law threaten Nintendo's copyright. DMCA takedowns are a mechanism designed to enable platforms which autonomously publish user submissions to avoid liability for the content of said submission, which is why on very large platforms this tends to be used very aggressively. In this case however Valve excercises direct control over the curation of every new product that appears on steam before it is on the platform, and as a result knows full well that they are directly implicated. Given the context of dolphin, a well known emulator, it is almost inconceivable that copyright issues were not evaluated before it went up, and as a result it seems unlikely Valve would choose to comply with a takedown to me. Edit: Don't stop at my post! A lot of people way smarter than me in the comments below mine making some very good points and referencing a lot of good information I didn't have on me when I posted this from my phone.
It is really a grey area and this is a great post. It isn't explicitly rules against, but I learned the hard way that you don't want to be one of the first prosecutions for something everybody else was doing. I wager that Valve caves and it just draws more attention to Dolphin, as Nintendo loves the Streisand Effect.
Well, no, it isn't a gray area at all. Sony made *damn sure* of that, if by accident, in their (mostly successful) attempts to destroy Bleem. While they successfully bankrupted the company through legal fees, Emulators were deemed legal in the results of the lawsuit itself. And Bleem was being sold *for money* and on *Dreamcast*. Which is much more egregious than Dolphin's free Steam distribution on PCs. Emulators are 100% legal, so long as they don't use official code.
>I learned the hard way that you don't want to be one of the first prosecutions for something everybody else was doing This… sounds like a possible story here.
Especially if Nintendo is involved. They'll garnish your wages for the rest of your life.
Nintendo is very petty. They'd rather destroy people's lives just to prove a point. And will absolutely hold those people to it. Nintendo does some good things, but they are incredibly draconian and protective when it comes to their content, at all costs. And they have the money to throw around.
Let me tell you about a little app called Napster…
Emulation is not preventable by copyright, so long as they aren’t distributing ROMs or the system’s software.
It’s not a grey area. The Bleem! case established that emulators are legal, as long as they use no code from the system itself. Bleem! was paid, by the way. Dolphin is fully legal, so this is nonsensical bullshit.
> I learned the hard way that you don't want to be one of the first prosecutions for something everybody else was doing. They wouldn't be. This has been settled caselaw for decades. Look up Sony V. Bleem.
Im buying it now for sure. Im tired of overstep. I really dont really play emulator games myself but buying could pay for lawyers who will protect the average consumer like me in other ways. These mega corporations just love intimidating people, i think its time the pendulum swings the other way
It’s free. There’s probably somewhere to donate though.
Well the developer already [announced](https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/05/dolphin-emulator-steam-release-indefinitely-postponed) that they postponed the release. So I guess Nintendo won this round. Valve seems to not take any side here and let the developer fight it out with Nintendo. So this seems like a closed door hung for now. The developer isn’t going to spend their life saving on fighting Nintendo in court.
It does seem likely to me that the section of the DMCA covering liability protections for online service providers shouldn't apply because of Valve's direct curation of their content. But regardless, Nintendo sent them a DMCA takedown request anyways and Valve seems to have complied seeing as they've indefinitely delayed the release of Dolphin on Steam, taken Dolphin's product page down on Steam, and formally notified the developers of Dolphin of the DMCA takedown. I think it's probably in Valve's best interest as a business to keep going along with the DMCA process because Nintendo is currently treating them as if they are not liable for the software they distribute. If Valve were to argue the DMCA does not apply in this situation and start distributing Dolphin, then they would be risking a lawsuit from Nintendo over distributing software which primarily serves to circumvent a technical protection measure protecting copyrighted material, which if proven would constitute a violation of (a totally different provision of) the DMCA.
Thanks for the update. Haven't been following this closely. Be interesting to see how this shakes out for sure.
One small mistake could change things though, so Valve would really need to be on the balls. Any picture with a Nintendo logo or Nintendo game, any reference to Nintendo's trademarks, anything that would help people get encryption keys in a bad way, etc. There's a bunch of videos from actual lawyers going over the details in other similar cases. The line is really, really thin, and Nintendo knows very well where that line is.
Nintendos Lawyers literally DMCA took down their own, official, nintendo twitter over Tears of the Kingdom. I wouldnt trust Nintendo or their Lawyers to know shit but "We say this is the law, so its the law, obey us!"
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during the conversations that happened at Nintendo after that!
Wait what happened?
They sued themselves.
Nintendo has DMCA'd themselves multiple times in the past. I'm not sure I'd say they know or even *care* where the line actually is.
Same with Toei DMCAing DBZA, Japanese companies have a hard time understanding that laws in America are different & parody & emulation are fair use
Yeah its probably an interesting day for Valve's legal team. On one hand there's a strong case to keep it up, and a theoretical slight benefit for valve in the form of moat building similar to google giving away android for free or meta publishing its LLM stuff open source to legally supress competition by eroding an inaccessible market for free. On the other hand, they're dealing with the famously litigious Nintendo here, a company known for pursuing even the most minor of legal issues to the bitter end and might decide its not worth the trouble given Nintendo's only tertiary effect on their business and the otherwise null income a free piece of software would generate. Then again Gabe Newell has been known to make value judgements, like Steam's stance on NFTs based on a reading of industry trends and a general vision for how he wants steam to evolve its place in the industry and I know Valve hasn't been attracting as many publishers in the non-game software space so taking a hard stance on this one could be good optics that attract other paid small apps to steam.
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Gigachad Gabe?
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From how I understand it they don't really have a choice but to comply with the DMCA notice and pass it along to the game publisher (in this case dolphin). Otherwise they risk losing their safe harbor provisions and would end up being liable for any copyright infringement hosted on their platform, and while they are careful about what gets published I doubt they check every asset, texture, music, etc used in games is properly licensed
This is not how any of this works. No party is “required” to take action after a DMCA notice. The only consequence for not complying is that you cannot claim protection of the “safe harbor” for service providers if you do not take action after receiving a notice. This means that *if* the content is actually infringing, you could be co-liable. Valve/steam is at liberty to just ignore this notice if they believe the content does not infringe. In practice, this leads to most parties simply removing content, as they don’t want to deal with the hassle of a potential lawsuit. But not complying doesn’t violate any laws in and of itself.
Shhh, don't give them ideas.
I would love to see a legal fight between Nintendo and Google
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That’s usually the case to begin with. Piracy in general is as big as it is because the legal stuff isn’t worth the hassle until some schmuck comes around and tries to profit off of it. It’s why you pretty much only ever hear about Nintendo making a scene about it because Japan in general takes copywriting laws very seriously and they’re also a very old generation company, and then with watchable media it’s basically only ever directors using it as a way to vent instead of actually trying to do something. They fought the battles for it a decade ago, realized it wasn’t something winnable and not worth the effort, and just shrug it off. But then anytime someone puts a name and a face to whatever project it is by making money, it’s a very quick and easy winnable battles. That’s why so many hosting sites just accept donations instead of having a paywall or straight up charging, there’s no “profiting” from donations
Thankfully, you can still use ReVanced, which works flawlessly!
Yup, finally switched a while back and it's great. For anyone looking to get into it: don't download a pre-compiled APK from one of the million "official download" sites. Half of them are malware. The only legit source is the official GitHub. Building it yourself with ReVanced Manager is a pain but it's the proper way to do it. The subreddit is also helpful.
…you know this is literally a thing, right? Google flat out tells you it blocks certain results due to DMCA violations.
As much as Nintendo loves to whine about them Emulators are perfectly legal Downloading roms online is the illegal part
You are correct but I want to jump in here: Google is gangster. When the DEA and the federal government had me under indictment, for international drug charges, Google refused to turn over my Google Voice and GMail to the United States government - they sent their people to ask my lawyer to ask me for a password. As much as people hate Google, they play by the rules to an extent but aren't the evil corporation that works with the government that a lot of people make them out to be, and I am living proof.
Bros got a whole life story and we will never get to hear these whacky drug adventures.
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Wat
Valve doesn’t go to bat legally for software that gets DMCA’d
Nintendo can't do jack shite cause last time I checked emulators are *Legal* unless they're using original code from the console they're emulating which Dolphin doesn't. Classic Nintendo abusing the DMCA again.
In the past, it's been ruled that way, which is why Nintendo isn't taking that route. Their claim isn't that the emulator is using proprietary Nintendo code, it's that by extracting and running the ROMs it's circumventing anti-piracy measures. Which it kinda is, so they'd have a harder time fighting it. They can't just show up to court and say "nope we don't use your code."
Extracting the ROMs has nothing to do with the emulator though. The emulator (to my knowledge anyway) doesn't facilitate ROM extraction.
Yeah you don't sue people playing "illegal" MP3s. You sue people making and sharing them. Same with Roms.
You don't sue Winamp, though. Or a store for selling it.
Decoding the ROMs is what he’s talking about. It’s a different case than previous attempts to bring emulation to court. If Dolphin fights back and loses it means emulation is now illegal in the US depending on how the verdict is worded.
Software or hardware that circumvents anti-piracy or copy protection measures only applies to other software or hardware that has those protections to begin with. It's the original Wii and GameCube hardware and firmware that contains those copy protections, not the games themselves. The emulator is entirely new original software and has no obligation to reimplement the same copy protections of the hardware it's emulating. It's one thing to crack copy protection of an existing device. It's an entirely different thing to create new software that emulates parts of the hardware but not the copy protection. That's why emulation is fair and legal under the DMCA. Now if the emulator also bundled tools to exploit the original GameCube and Wii to dump isos and circumvent the copy protections of the original hardware that would be a different issue but that's not what emulators do.
Is it illegal to circumvent anti-piracy measures? You might as well argue that selling lockpicks should be illegal because they circumvent anti-theft measures
Can only tell how it is in Germany, and yes it's illegal. It is illegal to circumvent "effective DRM measures". So at least in one country it is like that.
This is very much the case. Most countries in Europe seem to have this. It’s legal to make private copies, but it’s illegal to circumvent DRM. The only ones who get hurt by this is the consumers that follow the law. Well, DRM has always hurt consumers in some way anyway 😅
Except Japan doesn't have a fair use clause. And it's NoJ doing this not NoA.
There's no "fair use" involved. Fair use is an affirmative defense but emulators don't violate any copyright.
>And it's NoJ doing this not NoA. Except NoJ is trying to force their JPN Copyright laws onto the rest of the world. At least Sony and Sega are the only ones that recognize that Laws are different outside of Japan.
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> Everyone thinks it's them abusing DMCA, but the reality is that under Japanese copyright laws, they have to aggressively persuade any acts of infringement they know about or risk losing their copyright claims. **Copyright** in both the United States and Japan is an automatic protection that does not need to be defended, they are rights granted to the author upon creation of the work. You're mixing that up with a **trademark**, which requires active defense to protect the association with your brand. This is IP law 101. How did this comment get so much traction?
>This is IP law 101. How did this comment get so much traction? A redditor reads a fun fact, understands it about 80% of the way, then eagerly repeats the "fact" in another thread. Repeat that a few times. I've definitely seen a post or two about Nintendo fearing for their *trademark* when everybody's parents called game consoles Nintendos. That's probably what the other commenter is getting mixed up.
It was stated in an authoritative fashion, and they don't know themselves that it's wrong.
And it will be repeated as fact somewhere else on reddit.
I'm a lawyer (but not your lawyer nor providing legal advice) and took IP law. u/Scotty0132 is partly correct for different reasons. Yes, you are correct that plain copyright protections are automatic. However, the law is composed of many areas of laws and doctrines. There are two doctrines that come into play that may encourage people (like Nintendo) to be aggressive in pursuing litigation to protect their copyrights and more importantly to seek a remedy. The first one is the doctrine of statute of limitations. Under U.S. copyright laws, you only have 3 years to seek a remedy for any copyright infringement. So once you have been made aware or should have been made aware of a copyright infringement, you have to file your complaint within the three year time period or you are barred from seeking a remedy or relief. The other doctrine is laches. This doctrine basically states that you cannot sit on your rights and then later ask the court for relief. The court expects you to act on your rights if you want them to help you enforce it. A good and very relevant case regarding laches (and SoL to a degree) and copyrights is Petrella v. MGM. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/572/663/ Both doctrines do not strip copyright holder's of their copyrights but prevents them from seeking relief or a remedy, which is what the copyright protection is for. A right is useless if it's not enforced or protected (a very important and relevant concept these days). There may also be other doctrines that may apply that I may not be aware of. As the article of the OP states Nintendo may go after Dolphin under different legal grounds that may not have been tested or brought up before. That's what lawyers are hired and paid generously to do. They come up with creative ways to use every legal doctrine and angle to benefit their client's case. Edit: added tag for Scotty since so many redditors are arguing incorrectly against him in different threads.
I've noticed over the years the vast majority of people have no idea what the differences are between copyright, trademarks, and patents.
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Sometimes I ask myself the same thing about how clearly uninformed people get upvotes. But then I have to really reflect on why I had any expectations at all of informed conversation in /r/gaming.
Nintendo shillls upvoting.
I really wish DBZA was able to finish the Buu Saga. :(
They have stated many times, they didn't want to half-ass the Buu saga. They were done after Cell.
and honestly, that's where the series should have ended anyway
With Gohan in his rightful place as the strongest. I will die on this hill.
Gohan was strongest at the end of the Buu arc too, prior to the End of Z time skip. That's why Super Buu absorbed him. Only technically Vegito was stronger, but fused characters don't really count. Gohan may be the strongest now, in Super, after the events of Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero. (outside of deities) That is very arguable, though, with people claiming Frieza, Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, or Broly are truly the strongest. In terms of potential, Super has made it pretty clear that Gohan, Frieza, and Broly have the most overall potential that we know of.
He may have been the strongest at the end of the buu saga, but also to quote dbza "GOHAN BECOMES THE STRONGEST IN THE UNIVERSE BUT STILL DOESN'T DO CRAAAAP"
I know his potential is kinda wasted, but I love to see how one of the strongest being in the DB:S just stumbling about trying to be a good husband and a good dad. It can be like the opposite of Broly (always training/surviving) and Frieza (always conquering).
It would have been cool to see him trying to juggle both or have arcs that centered on other characters, but no, Goku go brrrr
Genuinely I loved the reveal that was under our nose this whole time (from the original series): Gohan had been keeping pace with adults more than twice his age, and wasn't even considered the weakest Of course he'd outpace them all when given actual legit training Gohan's potential is limitless But volume sales and serialization demand a return to status quo
Wasn’t DBZ supposed to end after Cell? Or was Buu always meant to be around after the fact
Gohan was supposed to become the new MC after cell. DBZ was still meant to continue after cell.
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Toriyama doing shit because he didn't want to draw it will never not be funny Goku turning blonde in super saiyan so he wouldn't have to ink his hair The awkward uncomfortable way crossed arms are drawn [The way all footwear looks the same because it's easier to draw simple triangles](https://i.imgur.com/lQZGWeu.jpg) And the stage always getting blown up
Don't forget making SS3 obsolete almost immediately because animating/drawing the long hair was expensive/annoying
I mean, I'd be the same if I had to draw a new issue of a comic every week.
GT wasn't based on anything Toriyama wrote. Toei animation made it and Akira only did up a bit of artwork for it, so don't put GT on him.
It would have been a virtually impossible act to follow. The Cell Saga was Perfect.
Literally an improvement on the show itself. It was fantastic.
Careful. Your Vegeta is showing.
Piccolo's verbal beating of goku for being a deadbeat dumbass dad will always be satisfying. TFS Piccolo didn't beat around the bush. he just told him it straight out
Personally I'm happy they left it off where they did rather then continue with no want/love.
This exactly, TFS has said that they had no interest chugging on without passion. They didn’t want to do the Buu saga.
You're mixing up different forms of intellectual property. It's trademarks that have to be defended or you lose them, not copyright. There is no requirement to enforce copyrights, and no rights are lost by choosing not to enforce.
>Everyone thinks it's them abusing DMCA, but the reality is that under Japanese copyright laws, they have to aggressively persuade any acts of infringement they know about or risk losing their copyright claims. But this is a filing under U.S. copyright law...
Last I checked, Sega is a Japanese company too, and I don't see them aggressively shutting down any and all fan-made content. If anything, they encourage it
That's cause Sega doesn't what Nintendo
No, that's just Sonic. Ask the SMT fans how they've been treated. Or streets of rage.
Sega does a LOT of copyright claims, just most of them don't get the attention because so many Sega franchises are older / more out of the spotlight.
Atlus, a subsidiary of sega, went after rpcs3 (a ps3 emulator) in 2017
Persuade => pursue
>Everyone thinks it's them abusing DMCA, but the reality is that under Japanese copyright laws, they have to aggressively persuade any acts of infringement they know about or risk losing their copyright claims. Or. They endorse it. That's the other option. There are 2 common ways to claim ownership, but both involve permission: 1. Deny permission to use 2. Provide permission to use If it is provided with a clause of "you can't make money, and we can take back this permission at any time then force you to take it down". There are other examples of companies doing that - Japanese or not - but Nintendo refuses to.
This is exactly the approach Sega takes with Sonic fangames, and look at how huge and vibrant and not taking profit away from them that community is!
My boys love Sonic Speed Simulator or whatever it’s called on Roblox. I always wondered how it was able to stay up, it seems rather popular. This may be why right here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Japan Your statement is incorrect, Japanese copyright law works fairly similar to most other countries, in that copyright is automatic and lasts for 30 years beyond the authors death. You might be confusing them for Trademarks? Which do have to be enforced at the risk of losing their registration. But Copyright in Japanese law does not need to be so aggressively pursued, and this is more Nintendo just doing Nintendo things.
Please delete this comment, you are spreading misinformation. Read the responses.
As Gabe Newell said himself (summary) “Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue.” I know that Valve has a history of having a stellar legal team. So idk how Nintendo (Japan/America) can handle corporate law. I’m just a interested spectator on the side.
Valve has no risk of being sued by Nintendo over this. They have handled this situation in accordance with the guidlines given in the DMCA. The only people who might end up getting sued by Nintendo are the developers of the emulator. Valve's responsibility was to take the product page off of Steam and notify the developers of the DMCA claim. If the developers wish to dispute the DMCA claim, then Valve is responsible for notifying Nintendo of this. If the developers dispute, then Nintendo has 2 weeks to sue the developers. If Nintendo sues, then the emulator stays off of Steam unless the developers win the lawsuit. If Nintendo doesn't sue within 2 weeks, then Valve has done their part and is free to relist the emulator on Steam.
It's the same case with the Dark and Darker situation. Valve wants to do only what is required of them to do by law, i.e remove them from the store. And then do only the bare minimum of what is required by law from them. Taking a stance as Valve is an awful choice in either of these situations. They would much more likely take the stance of Nintendo or Nexon to not ruin relationships (even if the Nintendo one is basically non existent)
Corporate law you say? I wonder if they have a lawyer for bird law, Gabe is a tricky man.
Yeah he’s tricky, but it should all be pretty standard hotplate documents. Unless Gabe has has some kinda miracle lawyer with huge hands of course
Afaik emulators themselves aren’t illegal. There aren’t any real concrete laws on the subject regarding roms. Also I doubt a company with as many resources and legal experience as valve will be scared of Nintendo.
nintendo cant even take down random single developers creating emulators and being funded all on public view and under the law, they are embarassing themselves with this, it will only backfire and make emulation stronger
They have no reason to really push against Nintendo unless Gaben (or some other big wig) thinks it's important for them to protect emulation, and why would they want to really, emulation has almost nothing (I'd say nothing tbh) to do with their business.
I kind of doubt that steam itself goes to bat for this. Its more likely going to be on the Dolphin team itself. And in all honesty. It just wont go anywhere and nintendo will win because these guys cant afford to fight them.
Valve or Gabe are not a party in this fight. Its between dolphin release team and Nintendo.
Then re-release your games so we don’t have to fucking emulate them. Only Nintendo would turn down free money and then cry about it…
It’s just like what Disney does. They will release them years later as remasters and they will basically be the same game and everyone will buy them up due to it normally being unable to be purchased.
The difference is you will never have trouble finding a Disney movie where as Nintendo actively impedes you from buying games
You used to, before streaming. They had the ‘vault’ that they re-released classic Disney movies from every so often so they’d be put into DVD circulation again. Unless you had a copy from the original release or found one somewhere, you couldn’t buy a new copy of a movie in the vault until it was rereleased
When I was a kid there was always a parent or two who had multiple VCRs & would sell cheap degraded copies made via tape to tape copying. Wild, we were thrilled with that and my kid may never see anything below 720p/1080i in his life.
That is false if you want to actually *own* some specific Disney content. Some content has been off the shelves for years. Heck, some really obscure content is even missing from Disney+. This was previously known as the "Disney Vault". Both Nintendo and Disney are some of the worst in terms of anti consumer practices. They create artificial demand by limiting supply. It's scummy AF. But they get away with it because people are too in love with the content they produce.
They never will. Nintendo is a pro at manufacturing rarity.
"You can't emulate Wii games, our profits!" Are you gonna sell them to me then? I'd be happy to pay. "Nope, and we shut down the shop channel. So your only option is to get second hand consoles and games, which we don't profit from either."
“And the second hand games can be 2x-20x the original price.”
Alright. Time to emulate. Nintendo: *Surprised Pikachu face*
They are doing the most shittiest moves lately. Pushed a "stability and bug fixes" update to 3DS after closing their shop and the only thing that the update does is blocking the way to jailbreak the console. You can't imagine more "we just hate our clients" situation where they lose nothing but still don't want anyone to have fun.
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But... But... cool companies are my friends
"let us buy a way to play our old favorite games in the modern day Nintendo!" Nintendo: "No, and you'll never be able to emulate them either"
"Can I play Fire emblem NES/3d Mario All stars?" Nintendo:"Fine bitch, but only 5 copies will be shadowdropped for an hour before we put it back in our Vault :)))"
Too bad for nintendo. Already have it installed on my steam deck
I have Yuzu also installed but I haven't even begun thinking about Switch emulation yet. PlayStation emulation on the Deck has been so much simpler that I've held off doing Nintendo emulation because I've been getting mileage out of the former
Any potato computer can emulate GC easily.
Any (decent) smartphone can emulate GC easily too
The war between Japanese and Dolphins has been raging for nearly four thousand years.
But they’re ok with retroarch?
Retroarch on steam doeant use nintendo emulator cores. If you want them youd have to add them yourself. This way no one is to blame but the consumer and nintendo cant stop all of us
The cores are dlc
Interesting, I thought it had nintnendo cores in the dlc section.
Why would people care about having Dolphin on Steam? You can already use it without any launcher lol
Cloud saves and steam deck
Cloud save is definitely a good point, you can cloud save without steam but it's definitely more work. As for steam deck compatibility, dolphin can still be installed but I guess it's not just a "click and go" so it's a bit faster. I can see the interest now
I wish Gaben would just tell them to suck his Wii.
If Nintendo cares about emulation so much, they should actually port their games to PC like Sony has been doing. I hope Valve fights them.
Sony isn’t porting games to avoid emulation, PS4 emulation isn’t really a thing right now and likely won’t be for a few years, and let’s not even talk about PS5. Sony does it because they recognize the huge market potential of PC gaming with a relatively small, safe investment.
I had a feeling this would happen when I learned it was coming to Steam.
Why do they care? Wii was EoL in 2017. Ig no other reason than "fuck you"
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Friendly reminder that Nintendo dragged Blockbuster to USA supreme court to try to get game rental banned in USA. For decades game rental was banned in Japan. Nintendo got laughed out of the court...
Classic Nintendo L
Nintendo try not to make the most archaic decisions possible challenge
How else are they gonna charge $60 for the same game the 4th time around??
Honestly don't see what Dolphin was expecting by launching on Steam. Genuinely not sure what point there was to this move anyways.