The other day it was reported that Nintendo had filed a DMCA takedown on the Steam version of the Dolphin Emulator however as it turns out that is not the case.
Dolphin Wasn’t Taken Down By A Nintendo DMCA Request
As it turns out there was no DMCA takedown request and it was actually a warning to Steam that Nintendo considers Dolphin to violate the DMCA. The updated information was revealed by Pierre Bourdon on Mastodon who is a former treasurer for Dolphin. Bourdon says that Valve contacted Nintendo to ask what they thought of Dolphin to which Nintendo supposedly replied “We think it’s bad and also that it violates the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions”. Following this message Valve’s legal team made the decision to take down Dolphin and sent the reply to Nintendo.
Unfortunately, this does mean that Dolphin has nothing to dispute as Valve chose to remove the emulator from its store page which, due to Valve’s Terms of Service, is indisputable. On another unfortunate note is that in my article I referenced some quoted material from a DMCA that did not actually exist so I’ll take the opportunity to apologise for sharing that false information.
