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.
@Creesch Not everyone agrees with this approach. That’s why it is controversial. But fact is, it is a risk to include the keys for anyone hosting the emulator, until it’s crisp and clear decided by court or by Nintendo. Until then we (the community), or the dev team, nor any lawyer knows with certainty if this is allowed or not. And that is the problem; we don’t know.
Fyi, you don’t need to ping someone when replying to them ;)
Anyway, yeah I get that it is controversial or already was. But you said it in isolation while the blog post explicitly goes into that choice which I think is important for context.
I know, but I add the id (its automated anyway) because it makes it a bit easier to follow discussion if others reply too. In example the upvotes will change the order (in my view at least) and I would need to scroll up and down to see who the answer was to. Doesn’t matter too much, but if it does not hurt, then I would continue like this. Or does it somehow spam the notification? Then I would reconsider this approach, as my goal is not to annoy anyone.
As for the legal stuff; there is not much else to say for us about the situation.
@Creesch Not everyone agrees with this approach. That’s why it is controversial. But fact is, it is a risk to include the keys for anyone hosting the emulator, until it’s crisp and clear decided by court or by Nintendo. Until then we (the community), or the dev team, nor any lawyer knows with certainty if this is allowed or not. And that is the problem; we don’t know.
Fyi, you don’t need to ping someone when replying to them ;)
Anyway, yeah I get that it is controversial or already was. But you said it in isolation while the blog post explicitly goes into that choice which I think is important for context.
I know, but I add the id (its automated anyway) because it makes it a bit easier to follow discussion if others reply too. In example the upvotes will change the order (in my view at least) and I would need to scroll up and down to see who the answer was to. Doesn’t matter too much, but if it does not hurt, then I would continue like this. Or does it somehow spam the notification? Then I would reconsider this approach, as my goal is not to annoy anyone.
As for the legal stuff; there is not much else to say for us about the situation.