Do the enthusiast devs have a legal leg to stand on? The repositories cited - like the re3 one on github - don't contain the original GTA3 game assets. It's all "new" code that runs the original game assets, or emulation/simulation wrappers to get OpenGL or DirectX to function like an old PS2 renderer. To play the re3 version of the game, you need the original GTA3 game for PC. To me, it seems more like SCUMM VM or a high-level emulator. Is that copyright infringement?
It’s tricky (obviously) but the code itself is certainly protected. If they decompiled the code and just cleaned it up it’s very grey. If they simply studied it’s workings and coded it fresh that’s pretty clearly not infringing. But if take-two can point at chunks of code that’s exactly the same they have a bit of a leg. Mainly though they know they won’t fight back so why not just sue? They have nothing to lose.
> If they decompiled the code and just cleaned it up it’s very grey.
From the filed complaint, Take-Two quote one of the developers :
> GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++
> The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit.
My understanding is that the code is directly reverse engineered/decompiled from the original code, so while it doesn't contain game assets, it's based on (compiled) code copyrighted by Take-Two.
It'd be interesting to see if this actually goes to court, because decompiled code is technically new code, not the original. Decompilers can't retrieve the original code written by Rockstar devs, but it can write new code that behaves like it. Is that a derivative work? If a person were to do that by hand, I think most people would say it's fair use.
From the filed complaint, Take-Two quote one of the developers :
> GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++
I know, as a software developer, I don’t consider that fair use, and I very much doubt any reasonable person would either.
Why? Nothing about the decompiled source guarantees that it will compile to the same binary. And once you compile it for a new platform that TT never published for, it's an original binary generated from original source.
It's as if person 1 built a machine (source+compiler) that generates paintings (binary) to sell, and then person 2 saw the painting and built an entirely different machine that can do the same thing. Person 1 can't tell person 2 what to do with their machine.
Think about it this way: if you compile source code, you get something that is technically new code (and not the original), but it is a derivative work.
Why would decompiling be different from compiling? In both cases, you are transforming code from one language to another and ending up with something "new", which is a derivative of the original. In any case, you can have a human come in and clean up, refactor, extend, or make changes... and the result is still a derivative of the original.
It doesn't really matter if you are doing it by hand or machine. I just don't see how that is relevant. There's a process involved where the input to that process is the original GTA 3, there's a bunch of steps, and the output to that process is code based on the original GTA 3 machine code, but in C or C++ instead of machine code.
There are two ways to get around this. The first way is fair use, which is complicated but certainly doesn't apply here. The other way is the "clean room" reverse engineering, where one team reverse engineers a product to figure out what it does, and produces a specification, which a second team uses to create a new implementation which does the same thing.
I think the court would probably see it as a derivative in this case. If you came up with something without looking at the original code you probably could get away with it. I think the term is 'colorization'. It would probably depend on how the lawyer presented the case. In this case it is basically just a transform of the original thing to do the original thing.
I think most groups that do this sort of thing understand that. Just depends on the company you are doing it to and how understanding they are of it and how much are they willing to spend to go after it. If you are spending thousands to go after something that may make you 200 bucks off of over the next 20 years you are just spending money on something that is basically worthless to the company. In this case they are probably burning a lot of good will. The mod community for those games is huge and in many ways keep those games interesting for people.
There's not one way compile or decompile code, though. Yeah, their goal is to create source code that produces the same binary as the original once run through a compiler, but the source on its own doesn't guarantee that will happen.
It's reverse engineered using IDA and such. I think even the class/functions names are the same since the developer forgot to strip one of the binaries.
As much as I support this kind of project, I would say they are legally screwed. But they already knew that when they started.
Yeah, sounds that way, if it's almost literally the same code rejiggered to build as C. A proper clean-room rewrite effort would be so much slower. You'd need one guy in IDA decompiling/understanding, then explaining the design of how it should work to read and render the assets etc without actually writing the code to do that, and someone different reading the spec and implementing it without touching the original code at all. Or a single person doing both halves but being almost impossibly strict about it.
Probably someone in the upper management of take-two had the idea of downsizing their legal department. That department have decided to demonstrate how incredibly useful they are, by suing a few people from Germany, New Zealand, Turkey, and United Kingdom.
> Defendants are well aware that they do not possess the right to copy, adapt, or distribute derivative GTA source code, or the audiovisual elements of the Games, and that doing so constitutes copyright infringement.
I think the opposite is true, what they did was fair use. The defendants are outside US, pretty sure everything they did was 100% legal in their jurisdictions.
> Defendants have made the Games fully and freely available to the public
They have made the game engine (the .exe) freely available to the public. To run the game, one also needs assets of the game.
Assets require overwhelming majority of disk space, take overwhelming majority of development budget to produce, and can be obtained legally by buying the original game.
> I think the opposite is true, what they did was fair use. The defendants are outside US, pretty sure everything they did was 100% legal in their jurisdictions.
There's just no way that it's fair use to distribute a decompiled copy of a game. Reverse engineering and decompiling are generally legal, but they don't strip away copyrights from the code.
Think about it this way... compiling source code does not change who has the copyright on the code. Decompiling source code does not change it either. Cleaning up the output from IDA or Ghidra does not magically strip away copyright.
If I went to a Broadway show and sat down with a pad of staff paper so I could transcribe all the songs, and then put my transcriptions up on GitHub, I could get sued by the composer and the composer would win.
> no way that it's fair use to distribute a decompiled copy of a game
That’s not what these people did. A source code of a re-implementation of a game engine is not a copy of the game. I have compiled and tested that thing, but it was only legal for me to do so because I had the original one bought on Steam.
> I could get sued by the composer
Right. “The great thing about this country is you can sue anyone for pretty much anything, and you probably win. Or at least, get a settlement.” https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Rakin_and_Ponzer
Yes, it is. They decompiled it with tools like IDA Pro and Ghidra, and then they cleaned up and refactored the results.
> ... but it was only legal for me to do so because I had the original one bought on Steam.
Whether it's legal for you to run the program is a separate issue. The fact is: the code is distributed to anyone who can access GitHub, not only people who have legitimate copies of GTA3.
> “The great thing about this country is you can sue anyone for pretty much anything, and you probably win.
It should have been clear that I was saying that the composer would have legal grounds to sue and win.
> the composer would have legal grounds to sue and win
I wonder was that tested in a court? In a case where the person who transcribed the song has not profited in any way from that, neither selling the transcription, not selling ads on the web?
Yes, over and over again I'm sure. I remember hearing about some specific cases involving Broadway composers but I can't remember the details. This is not some kind of weird edge case, it's an entire industry. You have people who write music, people who perform music, people who transcribe records, and then companies which sell books of transcriptions / arrangements. This is what most of the rock/pop music books at your local music store contain.
There's a market for people who want to learn to play The Beatles, so a skilled musician will listen to a Beatles record and transcribe all of the parts, an engraver will lay it out on the page, and a publishing company will negotiate with the rightsholders for a license.
You'll see many different versions of the same song, if you go down to the store. Some of the differences are due to different transcription choices, and other differences are simplifications or arrangements for different skill levels, different instruments, or other reasons. All of them are different, but the composer credit will be the same.
On the high level, copyright is a mechanism allowing to make profits from intellectual property. Take Two should demonstrate in the court how the defendants interfered with their ability to extract profit. I don’t think they can do that.
Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder.
Giving transcriptions for free and not even making money with advertisements on the web is not, and I would be interested to see a court case against a person doing that. Even if that’s a copyright violation that’s still reasonable. The copyright owner can assume that at least some of the people who have download free transcriptions would otherwise go to a music store and pay them for the license. The transcriber has caused monetary losses to copyright holder.
But with GTA3 it’s different. People like me who built and run the game from that github repository still need to own the original games. Therefore, people who developed that code have not caused any monetary losses to the developer selling original games.
> Take Two should demonstrate in the court how the defendants interfered with their ability to extract profit. I don’t think they can do that.
Maybe the law should work that way, but it definitely doesn't work that way.
> Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder.
Fair use has four factors, and whether the infringing party is making profit is only one of the four factors.
You can also get sued for photocopying sheet music you legally purchased, when you're not making any money from the copies or from the performances. It has happened because selling sheet music is the primary way some composers make money in the first place, and so much of the case law around music dates back to an era where that was just how music was published.
> But with GTA3 it’s different. People like me who built and run the game from that github repository still need to own the original games. Therefore, people who developed that code have not caused any monetary losses to the developer selling original games.
These kinds of arguments don't have any legal basis. You can argue for changes in copyright law all you like. Your original comment was about the legality, and that's what I'm responding to.
> the composer would have legal grounds to sue and win
>> I wonder was that tested in a court? In a case where the person who transcribed the song has not profited in any way from that, neither selling the transcription, not selling ads on the web?
N=1, but when I was in high school, I remember that several friends in the drama/theatre department were really disappointed one year because they'd performed a copyrighted play the year before for our school (at no charge; our principal firmly believed that charging the $1 admission they typically charged separated the "haves" from the "have-nots"), the board of education received a letter from the copyright holder, and now they were no longer able to do any plays for the school.
I guess this doesn't touch whether or not this has been tested in court, but it certainly scared the pants off our board of education.
It's not a decompiled copy. A decompiled copy is not useful for anything, as it would have to be recompiled. State of the art decompiles produce incomprehensible garbage, rarely even possible to compile.
In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel.
I don't know about fair use, but if the defendants are not in the US, then the concept of fair use is not even necessarily in play.
I have personally gone through the commit history of this project and read the source code. It is absolutely clear that this is based on the output of decompilers like IDA Pro and Ghidra. You can see how variables are not defined as ordinary variables, but as hard-coded addresses which are then cast to pointers of the appropriate type. The code is littered with unnecessary casts that are not typical of human programmers, but typical for how you get decompiled code to run.
Modern decompilers are a lot better than you might think. Additionally, old compilers produced code that is easier to decompile than you might think. But, here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question:
That does not look like code any human would write, if they were reimplementing a game. It looks like the code someone would write if they were cleaning up the output of a decompiler and assigning names to variables and functions which previously looked like "loc_95CC7C" or something similar. Once you figure out the purpose of a function or variable, you hit a button and rename it.
> In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel.
It's like someone transcribing the screenplay for a movie. The stage directions are going to be different, but it's still the same movie.
> here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question.
Do you have a link? I have downloaded all 3 branches (master, miami and lcs), searched for these constants and got nothing.
The code you have copy-pasted crashes on Windows with 100% guarantee. You see, lower 2GB (or optionally 1GB with the /3GB kernel switch) of address space is reserved for the OS kernel.
It looks like that's code from a very old commit. re3 was initially built by injecting code into the regular GTA 3 binary, and slowly replacing methods inside the game with drop-in replacements that functionally worked the same. When enough of these replacements were built, it was then converted to a standalone binary.
Indeed, git format-patch found them. The magic numbers were present in the very first commit, and removed on 17 Apr 2020. The readme of the first commit said this:
The aim of this project is to reverse GTA III for PC by replacing parts of the game one by one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus such that we have a working game at all times.
Gonna be interesting to see the 2400 years old thought experiment tested in a modern US court :-)
It seems like using something that's reverse engineering to achieve "interoperability", in this case playing the games on modern hardware, is generally legal in the US/EU, as long as you also own a license to the original, which seems like is a requirement to use the Re* versions, as you need the original game assets.
Decompilation / reverse engineering is very different from "transcribing" a play. Transcribing a play, you would get back an almost exact copy of the source material, whereas decompiling is more akin to taking a car and measuring all the bits of it. You would certainly not get the original drawings or CAD files back out of it. You do not decompile "source code", but machine code, and the source code you get back is not a recreation of the original copyrighted code, but the decompiler's analysis of the machine instructions, stripped of the original design and intent (the creative work part which makes source code copyrightable in the first place).
Measurements (or information) in general is not copyrightable, despite what IP protectionism claims, and in this analogy the machine code is much closer to the mechanical pieces of the car that make it work than the original designs. Either way, the fair use / reverse engineering provisions already create an exemption.
The questions is wether there are enough legal loopholes to squash these generally allowed uses through some other parts of the law or licensing terms, eg. by claiming that some IP (patents, trade secrets) are infringed some other way by publishing the reverse engineered code.
I think people are hung up here on the question of whether reverse engineering is legal or whether it is considered fair use to reverse engineer something. However, I don't think that's the relevant question.
The question here is whether you are allowed to publish the results of your reverse engineering and decompilation efforts on GitHub. In this case, the answer seems like a very clear and obvious "no".
1. It's a derivative work of the original.
2. It's the entire executable, not just a portion.
3. It's not transformative.
4. The original work is creative.
5. It competes with demand for the original work (remasters).
With so many different factors stacked against it, I just don't see any kind of plausible defense here.
> Transcribing a play, you would get back an almost exact copy of the source material, whereas decompiling is more akin to taking a car and measuring all the bits of it.
Another red herring here... it is irrelevant how superficially close this is to the original source code.
When you compile a program, the result is not a copy of the original source code either. However, the compiled version of a program retains the copyright of the original source code. Likewise, a decompiled program would retain the copyright.
> The questions is wether there are enough legal loopholes to squash these generally allowed uses...
"Legal loopholes" kind of presumes that this sort of effort is permitted by default, but might be illegal through some kind of technicality. These people are distributing the results of IDA Pro / Ghidra decompilation efforts of an entire executable program on GitHub. Seems like very crystal-clear case of copyright infringement.
Again, to clarify things because people are hung up on this point--it is not about whether reverse engineering is legal. It is about whether you are permitted to distribute the results of reverse engineering. Kind of like asking whether it's legal to rip a CD... yes, ripping a CD is legal. Posting a ripped CD online is not.
Interesting points! I am not sure which is right, or legal, but there seem to be grey zones, yet.
> Another red herring here... it is irrelevant how superficially close this is to the original source code.
It wasn't until Apple vs. Franklin that object code became copyrightable, prior to that the USPTO held the analogy of "design drawings vs. actual bridge" as the relation of "source vs. object code", and as far as I am aware that case still left some questions open.
There's also the first sale doctrine. So, once I buy a (mechanical, haha) car, I can modify it, take measurements of it, in fact describe and publish every bit of information I can think up of, right, because once it was given to me, I can do with it as I please, unimpeded by the manufacturer. This is, of course, where things get murky.
Now, a binary has elements of literal nature that copyright protects, but a decompilation results in a completely different information stream, so that seems like a non issue. Thus, we are left with the non-literal copyrightable elements of structure, sequence, organization. Copyright protects expression, but not ideas. So, the binary code is an expression of the author's ideas, and thus it seems sensible that the decompiled version is, too, BUT: only creative expression, not things that are necessary and utilitarian to perform a given function, and this is where it get's less well-defined. So if there are decompiled portions, that might not be enough for a copyright claim, provided they are utilitarian in nature. Of course, just decompiling the whole thing and publishing that looks very much like infringemen, indeed.
I do think this nicely embodies the difficulty of dealing with IP vs. actual, tangible things, though. With the car or bridge analogs, copyright would not prevent anyone from replicating them, but it would be patents and trademarks that put restrictions on how and what can be reproduced, instead of the much stronger restrictions of copyright on software.
I'd personally much more comfortably equate binary code with mechanical elements than works of creative authorship (though much of my livelyhood relies on the latter, in lieu of other mechanisms), but this view isn't universally shared, and possibly not even universally applicable.
> I do think this nicely embodies the difficulty of dealing with IP vs. actual, tangible things, though. With the car or bridge analogs, copyright would not prevent anyone from replicating them, but it would be patents and trademarks that put restrictions on how and what can be reproduced, instead of the much stronger restrictions of copyright on software.
Photographs of artwork such as paintings or statues are routinely seen to be infringements of the original work. So it is not unique to software. There are lots of demarcations and corner cases for this... for example, if you install your statue in public, you no longer have grounds to sue people for photographing it. If the statue is a minor part of a photograph, then it's not infringement.
Same applies to software. This is well-tread ground, by this point. People have been reverse engineering and copying software for a long time.
> Now, a binary has elements of literal nature that copyright protects, but a decompilation results in a completely different information stream, so that seems like a non issue.
Copyright protects original works of authorship. There is nothing in copyright law that talks about something's "literal nature" or different "information streams". For example, if I write a song, I am still the author of the song even when that song is performed--even though that requires a significant amount of interpretation, transformation, and creativity on the part of the musicians. I am still the author.
Likewise, if I write a book about a character named Jean-Luc Picard, who is the bald captain of a captain of a spaceship in my made-up universe, Paramount has grounds to sue for copyright infringement.
Copyright law talks mostly about very ordinary terms like authorship. Authorship survives all sorts of transformations... not infinitely so, but neither decompilation nor refactoring will change who the author of a program is.
> There's just no way that it's fair use to distribute a decompiled copy of a game. Reverse engineering and decompiling are generally legal, but they don't strip away copyrights from the code.
In France it's legal to redistribute it if it's for "interopability purposes" which is very easy to defend in this case since RE3 is primarly used to make a massive amount of ports (Switch, Vita...) which would not exist without this project.
They are not, but AFAIK these concepts are somewhat close, at least on the high level.
The developers were not distributing the game, the game engine they made is useless without the assets. The developers probably obtained their copies of the games legally. AFAIK, their primary motivation was to make the game work better on modern computers (that’s why the rendering patches), and to make the game run on the platforms not supported by Rockstar such as ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi. The laws regulating reverse engineering often have exceptions for compatibility purpose. Most importantly, the developers have not profited from their work, they did it for fun.
> pretty sure everything they did was 100% legal in their jurisdictions.
Probably not, but they also uploaded the reverse-engineered source code and binaries to Github in the United States. They then filed DMCA counter-notices, which opens them up to personal jurisdiction in federal district court in the U.S., per 17 USC 512(g)(3)(D). [0].
Man, regardless of who is in the right legally, I wish these big corporations had a better sense of humor and would understand and appreciate that the people who go to these lengths to understand and recreate the original code aren't their enemies, but their biggest fans.
They make money from having lots of customers, not from having a few obsessed fans. I’ve heard this argument before but the kind of people who are obsessed enough to reverse-engineer old games don’t necessarily even play new games. They’re often fans of the old games and don’t play new games, or they’re people who are interested in reverse engineering.
You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engineered version would be competing with it.
It's funny because I bet a GTA V license costs more than whatever they are going to charge for remastered. So they are competing with themselves by offering a cheaper option (if we ignore the fact that a lot of people already own GTA V). I'd be willing to bet a lot of people who want to play the remastered older games haven't played GTA V because they normally wouldn't. So still lost revenue imo.
> You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engineered version would be competing with it.
The Console HD (Well 720p) remasters of the 3D GTAs don't even compete with the original versions with mods imo :-P.
They are the ported from the mobile ports of the games, have tons of bugs (Edit: some of the bugs on the 360 stem from RROD issues on consoles that have just not yet RROD'ed), break many of the game mechanics and redender models like trash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhVdb4K1M-M <- Sa comparisons as an example
(Note: I know you are on about how mods / RE projects compete with offical releases from a product standpoint, not a quality standpoint. Just wanted to say that RS had their chance to improve the longevity of the older 3D titles and they fucked it up)
Porting the mobile port back to PC is one of my biggest complaints with remasters. Final Fantasy on PC went that route and I would honestly rather pay Square $15 for an emulated version then the releases we got.
The new 'pixel remaster' games Square is putting out have been great so far. Standardizing on a 16-bit sprite style, new music arrangements, and widescreen support. Only issue is the English font choice, but if you're on PC that's easy enough to fix.
Here’s another data point since it’s not always as simple as “remastering”.
Nintendo released Super Mario 3D All Stars for a limited purchase window between Sept 2020 and March 2021. Super Mario 64 was included in its original 1996 glory, included a low frame rate, 4:3 aspect ratio, low res textures (iirc they were slightly improved). In fact, Nintendo’s bundle was literally a N64 emulator running on the switch.
At the same time, a group of reverse engineers had decompiled the original ROM, converted it to readable C, and added many improvements: 60FPS, widescreen support, high res textures, etc.
Most notably, the project allowed them to compile the source code to native Switch architecture, which greatly improved performance and power consumption.
Most enthusiasts would agree that the “fan project” is objectively a better experience.
But this flies blatantly in the face of the above comment because it's highly unlikely that the existence of the superior freeware cost Nintendo very many sales. 'Mario 3D All Stars' almost certainly sold wonderfully for them.
In fact, I'd guess it's much more likely that the existence of such fan projects increases sales. Because it keep a conversation going about the IP. We can certainly say, an old IP that is not being talked about is essentially not selling.
> You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engineered version would be competing with it.
Technically, that's correct of course. But realistically, how many people will build one of these projects from the source code they obtained from GitHub, download the game assets from somewhere and spend a lot of time to make it all work on their machine instead of just buying the remastered version? Some, sure, but I don't see Rockstar losing a lot of money here.
If I were in their shoes I would simply hire these developers. And leave their fan projects alone as a sign of good-will and generosity towards the community.
> But realistically, how many people will build one of these projects from the source code they obtained from GitHub
They released pre-built files. You download the stock version from steam like normal then unpack the pre-built files over the top replacing some of the original files (Just like many of the mods for these games).
It's something I really appreciate about Sega's handling of Sonic IP: as long as you aren't trying to make money you can pretty much get away with anything. I think Sonic's continued popularity is in no small part due to this policy.
It's also something that makes me appreciate how Capcom approached the Resident Evil 2 remake. They invited the devs up to their studio to show them the official remake and then asked them to cease developing theirs. No drama or bad blood.
>I really appreciate about Sega's handling of Sonic IP: as long as you aren't trying to make money you can pretty much get away with anything.
I disagree. Sega can be an awful-bully when it comes to their IP. It wasn't until the SteamDB issue went viral that they backed-down [1] and the Streets of Rage remake. [2]
I‘d simple offer employment if i where in the position to do so. Let them improve the games from within, they surely showed talent and knowledge.
Legal action can have the opposite effect here.
Often folks who make these mods are young or based somewhere outside of the US. Not that there couldnt be a job for them but its not all that likely that there would be a role that would actually be a good fit skill wise and location wise if there were even eligible to work in that country.
Isnt part of the issue here copyright law? If they don't shut down things like this then eventually one of them grows large enough that it does start making money, ends up in court with Take-Two, and the judge could say that GTA copyright doesnt hold up since they failed to protect their copyright when they knew there were many people infringing on it.
I don't support this action by Take-Two but I think this is more of a legal situation rather than a, "How dare they try to rip off our game?" situation.
Is it very likely that a project, I'm assuming no one works on this full time or at least gets paid to work on it full time, could afford to license a major franchise from a larger company?
I am no legal expert, but the gamer in me instinctively sides with DMCA recipient. I am tired of the lazy ports, rushed remasters and overall shit show that gaming industry has become. It does help that I don't play as much as I used to, but I would like to have a better world for my children:P
>As per legal requirements, Github complied with the takedown demand but, as TF noted at the time, the team behind the projects had the option of filing a DMCA counter-notice if it was confident that its work is permitted under copyright law.
>After assessing its options, that’s exactly what the team did, leaving Take-Two just a couple of weeks to file a lawsuit to prevent the content reappearing on Github. When that time expired, the coding platform restored ‘re3’ and ‘reVC’, as per the law.
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty generous take on what happened.
The Take-Two counter notice [1] was filed by td512, who had a fork of the re3 repo, but doesn't seem to have any commits in the repo, so it's kinda hard to call him part of the team. And his reasoning for filing the counter notice was that the repo contained "no code owned by Take Two", which is a bit questionable (I guess it's now up for the court to decide) since the code is decompiled and then cleaned up. Meanwhile in May, Ash R., who I believe is part of the re3 team (and is in fact beind sued as Doe 1), posted on Twitter [2] about how the team was close to filing a counter notice before the news of the repo being restored hit the news, potentially tanking the whole project.
EDIT: Actually, it looks like there are two more counter claims as per the suit, however they seem to have been filed after the initial counter claim was filed and indeed after the repository was restored / news of the restoration were reported on. The first [3] seems like a carbon copy of the first claim while the second one [4] seems a bit more carefully worded.
> The company says that the counter notices sent by the defendants in response were not legitimate.
> “In at least three separate instances between April and June of 2021, Defendants Orçunus, Morra, and Graber submitted sworn counter notifications to GitHub claiming the takedown of the repositories was mistaken or otherwise not legitimate,” the lawsuit reads.
> “Take-Two is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that these counter notifications were made in bad faith, and knowingly and deliberately misrepresented to GitHub the contents of the re3 GitHub Repositories.”
It really isn’t fair to put all of this legalese in front of laypeople (and in this case, laypeople in other countries/legal systems) and then allow highly experienced corporate attorneys to nitpick their obviously inadequate understanding of the language and its implications.
I played a pirate copy of VC when I was a poor student and loved the game.
Hearing of ReVC just now made me consider buying it, a 20 year old game. Take-Twos belligerent approach just killed that consideration. They have fans both hardcore enough to restore the game and loving enough to provide the restored version to others, and they choose to slap them with a lawsuit over a 20 year old game?
We the people don’t have the right to distribute copyrighted files, but we do have a right to repair broken software, just like we have the right to repair other things we own, and we certainly have a right to help others do the same.
I suspect that they plan to rerelease or remaster the game, and having a fan project being of higher quality than their own product would undercut their sales expectations.
>[...]having a fan project being of higher quality than their own product[...]
Seeing how the recent GTA:SA releases perform, that's quite easy to achieve. Makes me think there should be some legal contemplation that if you don't actively distribute or charge for this stuff you get to do it anyhow.
I'll bet Take Two has a case here. That said, they've just guaranteed they'll never see another dollar out of me. This is one of those cases where they had another play that was win-win. (Well, except for the lawyers.)
Is anyone here a lawyer who can explain why it's worth taking such a big publicity hit over this by Take-Two? Like it is clear these guys are not taking away any business from them, nor are they really losing any money.
Is there some sort of IP reason, like they need to defend the IP lest it be marked as being abandoned? Or is there some other legit reason beyond spite that they are taking this on? I dont see Take-Two losing any significant amount of income from this enthusiast project, but I could be wrong and I am willing to be corrected.
IAAL, and this is actually pretty accurate. Also of note, there is a princple within the law that basically suggests "if you don't vigorously defend your IP, that can be taken to mean you don't much care in the future as well." Honestly, in our modern environment, I don't find that much compelling (as something to really worry about from a developer POV), but it does exist.
> a princple within the law that basically suggests "if you don't vigorously defend your IP, that can be taken to mean you don't much care in the future as well."
You may be right that, for now, that's where its mostly clearly stated..but..
I don't do much IP personally, but I'm familiar enough to have seen that a lot of people, even judges, don't always draw those technical clear lines between different types of IP. So, going both ways -- it's not unthinkable that someone would try to
1) apply this reasoning but with copyright and/or
2) claim (if flimisily) that this is trademark infringement, despite it not exactly fitting with how the law is supposed to work.
Doesn't the fallout from this like make it a bad thing to do though? They are pretty much attacking their biggest fans. I am pretty sure that's generally not a good idea from a marketing standpoint.
The plaintiff claims that the apple is theirs and any pictures of the apple is also theirs .. this may undue Take-Two as to why fair use exists. The outcome is far from certain - which means Take-Two may be the real target
Wow, incredibly short sighted of take two. They were being handed free money and decided to shred it. Wonder how the shareholders will feel about that...
I'll make a similar comparison. Let us take technology out it:
I make a board game and give away instructions on how to play the game. The game instructions include going out and buying Lego pieces to assemble the boardgame. Lego now wants to make boardgames and sues me. Is what I'm doing illegal?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 371 ms ] threadThis is from the CODING STYLE document:
"Don't just copy paste code from IDA, make it look nice"
https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3/blob/master/CODING_STYLE.m...
"Don't just copy paste code from IDA, pull it thru GitHub Copilot first"
From the filed complaint, Take-Two quote one of the developers :
> GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++
And although this probably has no relevance from a legal standpoint, but sounds pretty bad in the context of the complaint, from right at the bottom of https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3/blob/master/CODING_STYLE.m... :
> Generally, try to make the code look as if R* could have written it
It's a shame a simple take-down request wasn't sent (and complied with) first...
> The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit.
> GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the decompiler and massage it back into readable C++
I know, as a software developer, I don’t consider that fair use, and I very much doubt any reasonable person would either.
It's as if person 1 built a machine (source+compiler) that generates paintings (binary) to sell, and then person 2 saw the painting and built an entirely different machine that can do the same thing. Person 1 can't tell person 2 what to do with their machine.
Why would decompiling be different from compiling? In both cases, you are transforming code from one language to another and ending up with something "new", which is a derivative of the original. In any case, you can have a human come in and clean up, refactor, extend, or make changes... and the result is still a derivative of the original.
It doesn't really matter if you are doing it by hand or machine. I just don't see how that is relevant. There's a process involved where the input to that process is the original GTA 3, there's a bunch of steps, and the output to that process is code based on the original GTA 3 machine code, but in C or C++ instead of machine code.
There are two ways to get around this. The first way is fair use, which is complicated but certainly doesn't apply here. The other way is the "clean room" reverse engineering, where one team reverse engineers a product to figure out what it does, and produces a specification, which a second team uses to create a new implementation which does the same thing.
https://chart.copyrightdata.com/Colorization.html https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/can-derivative-works-be-c...
I think most groups that do this sort of thing understand that. Just depends on the company you are doing it to and how understanding they are of it and how much are they willing to spend to go after it. If you are spending thousands to go after something that may make you 200 bucks off of over the next 20 years you are just spending money on something that is basically worthless to the company. In this case they are probably burning a lot of good will. The mod community for those games is huge and in many ways keep those games interesting for people.
As much as I support this kind of project, I would say they are legally screwed. But they already knew that when they started.
> Defendants are well aware that they do not possess the right to copy, adapt, or distribute derivative GTA source code, or the audiovisual elements of the Games, and that doing so constitutes copyright infringement.
I think the opposite is true, what they did was fair use. The defendants are outside US, pretty sure everything they did was 100% legal in their jurisdictions.
> Defendants have made the Games fully and freely available to the public
They have made the game engine (the .exe) freely available to the public. To run the game, one also needs assets of the game.
Assets require overwhelming majority of disk space, take overwhelming majority of development budget to produce, and can be obtained legally by buying the original game.
There's just no way that it's fair use to distribute a decompiled copy of a game. Reverse engineering and decompiling are generally legal, but they don't strip away copyrights from the code.
Think about it this way... compiling source code does not change who has the copyright on the code. Decompiling source code does not change it either. Cleaning up the output from IDA or Ghidra does not magically strip away copyright.
If I went to a Broadway show and sat down with a pad of staff paper so I could transcribe all the songs, and then put my transcriptions up on GitHub, I could get sued by the composer and the composer would win.
That’s not what these people did. A source code of a re-implementation of a game engine is not a copy of the game. I have compiled and tested that thing, but it was only legal for me to do so because I had the original one bought on Steam.
> I could get sued by the composer
Right. “The great thing about this country is you can sue anyone for pretty much anything, and you probably win. Or at least, get a settlement.” https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Rakin_and_Ponzer
Yes, it is. They decompiled it with tools like IDA Pro and Ghidra, and then they cleaned up and refactored the results.
> ... but it was only legal for me to do so because I had the original one bought on Steam.
Whether it's legal for you to run the program is a separate issue. The fact is: the code is distributed to anyone who can access GitHub, not only people who have legitimate copies of GTA3.
> “The great thing about this country is you can sue anyone for pretty much anything, and you probably win.
It should have been clear that I was saying that the composer would have legal grounds to sue and win.
I wonder was that tested in a court? In a case where the person who transcribed the song has not profited in any way from that, neither selling the transcription, not selling ads on the web?
Yes, over and over again I'm sure. I remember hearing about some specific cases involving Broadway composers but I can't remember the details. This is not some kind of weird edge case, it's an entire industry. You have people who write music, people who perform music, people who transcribe records, and then companies which sell books of transcriptions / arrangements. This is what most of the rock/pop music books at your local music store contain.
There's a market for people who want to learn to play The Beatles, so a skilled musician will listen to a Beatles record and transcribe all of the parts, an engraver will lay it out on the page, and a publishing company will negotiate with the rightsholders for a license.
You'll see many different versions of the same song, if you go down to the store. Some of the differences are due to different transcription choices, and other differences are simplifications or arrangements for different skill levels, different instruments, or other reasons. All of them are different, but the composer credit will be the same.
Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder.
Giving transcriptions for free and not even making money with advertisements on the web is not, and I would be interested to see a court case against a person doing that. Even if that’s a copyright violation that’s still reasonable. The copyright owner can assume that at least some of the people who have download free transcriptions would otherwise go to a music store and pay them for the license. The transcriber has caused monetary losses to copyright holder.
But with GTA3 it’s different. People like me who built and run the game from that github repository still need to own the original games. Therefore, people who developed that code have not caused any monetary losses to the developer selling original games.
Maybe the law should work that way, but it definitely doesn't work that way.
> Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder.
Fair use has four factors, and whether the infringing party is making profit is only one of the four factors.
You can also get sued for photocopying sheet music you legally purchased, when you're not making any money from the copies or from the performances. It has happened because selling sheet music is the primary way some composers make money in the first place, and so much of the case law around music dates back to an era where that was just how music was published.
> But with GTA3 it’s different. People like me who built and run the game from that github repository still need to own the original games. Therefore, people who developed that code have not caused any monetary losses to the developer selling original games.
These kinds of arguments don't have any legal basis. You can argue for changes in copyright law all you like. Your original comment was about the legality, and that's what I'm responding to.
>> I wonder was that tested in a court? In a case where the person who transcribed the song has not profited in any way from that, neither selling the transcription, not selling ads on the web?
N=1, but when I was in high school, I remember that several friends in the drama/theatre department were really disappointed one year because they'd performed a copyrighted play the year before for our school (at no charge; our principal firmly believed that charging the $1 admission they typically charged separated the "haves" from the "have-nots"), the board of education received a letter from the copyright holder, and now they were no longer able to do any plays for the school.
I guess this doesn't touch whether or not this has been tested in court, but it certainly scared the pants off our board of education.
In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel.
I don't know about fair use, but if the defendants are not in the US, then the concept of fair use is not even necessarily in play.
The suit is filed in California so I imagine that Fair Use, and the rest of the US legal code, is in play.
I have personally gone through the commit history of this project and read the source code. It is absolutely clear that this is based on the output of decompilers like IDA Pro and Ghidra. You can see how variables are not defined as ordinary variables, but as hard-coded addresses which are then cast to pointers of the appropriate type. The code is littered with unnecessary casts that are not typical of human programmers, but typical for how you get decompiled code to run.
Modern decompilers are a lot better than you might think. Additionally, old compilers produced code that is easier to decompile than you might think. But, here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question:
That does not look like code any human would write, if they were reimplementing a game. It looks like the code someone would write if they were cleaning up the output of a decompiler and assigning names to variables and functions which previously looked like "loc_95CC7C" or something similar. Once you figure out the purpose of a function or variable, you hit a button and rename it.> In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel.
It's like someone transcribing the screenplay for a movie. The stage directions are going to be different, but it's still the same movie.
Do you have a link? I have downloaded all 3 branches (master, miami and lcs), searched for these constants and got nothing.
The code you have copy-pasted crashes on Windows with 100% guarantee. You see, lower 2GB (or optionally 1GB with the /3GB kernel switch) of address space is reserved for the OS kernel.
The aim of this project is to reverse GTA III for PC by replacing parts of the game one by one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus such that we have a working game at all times.
Gonna be interesting to see the 2400 years old thought experiment tested in a modern US court :-)
Decompilation / reverse engineering is very different from "transcribing" a play. Transcribing a play, you would get back an almost exact copy of the source material, whereas decompiling is more akin to taking a car and measuring all the bits of it. You would certainly not get the original drawings or CAD files back out of it. You do not decompile "source code", but machine code, and the source code you get back is not a recreation of the original copyrighted code, but the decompiler's analysis of the machine instructions, stripped of the original design and intent (the creative work part which makes source code copyrightable in the first place).
Measurements (or information) in general is not copyrightable, despite what IP protectionism claims, and in this analogy the machine code is much closer to the mechanical pieces of the car that make it work than the original designs. Either way, the fair use / reverse engineering provisions already create an exemption.
The questions is wether there are enough legal loopholes to squash these generally allowed uses through some other parts of the law or licensing terms, eg. by claiming that some IP (patents, trade secrets) are infringed some other way by publishing the reverse engineered code.
The question here is whether you are allowed to publish the results of your reverse engineering and decompilation efforts on GitHub. In this case, the answer seems like a very clear and obvious "no".
1. It's a derivative work of the original.
2. It's the entire executable, not just a portion.
3. It's not transformative.
4. The original work is creative.
5. It competes with demand for the original work (remasters).
With so many different factors stacked against it, I just don't see any kind of plausible defense here.
> Transcribing a play, you would get back an almost exact copy of the source material, whereas decompiling is more akin to taking a car and measuring all the bits of it.
Another red herring here... it is irrelevant how superficially close this is to the original source code.
When you compile a program, the result is not a copy of the original source code either. However, the compiled version of a program retains the copyright of the original source code. Likewise, a decompiled program would retain the copyright.
> The questions is wether there are enough legal loopholes to squash these generally allowed uses...
"Legal loopholes" kind of presumes that this sort of effort is permitted by default, but might be illegal through some kind of technicality. These people are distributing the results of IDA Pro / Ghidra decompilation efforts of an entire executable program on GitHub. Seems like very crystal-clear case of copyright infringement.
Again, to clarify things because people are hung up on this point--it is not about whether reverse engineering is legal. It is about whether you are permitted to distribute the results of reverse engineering. Kind of like asking whether it's legal to rip a CD... yes, ripping a CD is legal. Posting a ripped CD online is not.
> Another red herring here... it is irrelevant how superficially close this is to the original source code.
It wasn't until Apple vs. Franklin that object code became copyrightable, prior to that the USPTO held the analogy of "design drawings vs. actual bridge" as the relation of "source vs. object code", and as far as I am aware that case still left some questions open.
There's also the first sale doctrine. So, once I buy a (mechanical, haha) car, I can modify it, take measurements of it, in fact describe and publish every bit of information I can think up of, right, because once it was given to me, I can do with it as I please, unimpeded by the manufacturer. This is, of course, where things get murky.
Now, a binary has elements of literal nature that copyright protects, but a decompilation results in a completely different information stream, so that seems like a non issue. Thus, we are left with the non-literal copyrightable elements of structure, sequence, organization. Copyright protects expression, but not ideas. So, the binary code is an expression of the author's ideas, and thus it seems sensible that the decompiled version is, too, BUT: only creative expression, not things that are necessary and utilitarian to perform a given function, and this is where it get's less well-defined. So if there are decompiled portions, that might not be enough for a copyright claim, provided they are utilitarian in nature. Of course, just decompiling the whole thing and publishing that looks very much like infringemen, indeed.
I do think this nicely embodies the difficulty of dealing with IP vs. actual, tangible things, though. With the car or bridge analogs, copyright would not prevent anyone from replicating them, but it would be patents and trademarks that put restrictions on how and what can be reproduced, instead of the much stronger restrictions of copyright on software.
I'd personally much more comfortably equate binary code with mechanical elements than works of creative authorship (though much of my livelyhood relies on the latter, in lieu of other mechanisms), but this view isn't universally shared, and possibly not even universally applicable.
Photographs of artwork such as paintings or statues are routinely seen to be infringements of the original work. So it is not unique to software. There are lots of demarcations and corner cases for this... for example, if you install your statue in public, you no longer have grounds to sue people for photographing it. If the statue is a minor part of a photograph, then it's not infringement.
Same applies to software. This is well-tread ground, by this point. People have been reverse engineering and copying software for a long time.
> Now, a binary has elements of literal nature that copyright protects, but a decompilation results in a completely different information stream, so that seems like a non issue.
Copyright protects original works of authorship. There is nothing in copyright law that talks about something's "literal nature" or different "information streams". For example, if I write a song, I am still the author of the song even when that song is performed--even though that requires a significant amount of interpretation, transformation, and creativity on the part of the musicians. I am still the author.
Likewise, if I write a book about a character named Jean-Luc Picard, who is the bald captain of a captain of a spaceship in my made-up universe, Paramount has grounds to sue for copyright infringement.
Copyright law talks mostly about very ordinary terms like authorship. Authorship survives all sorts of transformations... not infinitely so, but neither decompilation nor refactoring will change who the author of a program is.
In France it's legal to redistribute it if it's for "interopability purposes" which is very easy to defend in this case since RE3 is primarly used to make a massive amount of ports (Switch, Vita...) which would not exist without this project.
They are not, but AFAIK these concepts are somewhat close, at least on the high level.
The developers were not distributing the game, the game engine they made is useless without the assets. The developers probably obtained their copies of the games legally. AFAIK, their primary motivation was to make the game work better on modern computers (that’s why the rendering patches), and to make the game run on the platforms not supported by Rockstar such as ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi. The laws regulating reverse engineering often have exceptions for compatibility purpose. Most importantly, the developers have not profited from their work, they did it for fun.
Probably not, but they also uploaded the reverse-engineered source code and binaries to Github in the United States. They then filed DMCA counter-notices, which opens them up to personal jurisdiction in federal district court in the U.S., per 17 USC 512(g)(3)(D). [0].
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512
You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engineered version would be competing with it.
The Console HD (Well 720p) remasters of the 3D GTAs don't even compete with the original versions with mods imo :-P.
They are the ported from the mobile ports of the games, have tons of bugs (Edit: some of the bugs on the 360 stem from RROD issues on consoles that have just not yet RROD'ed), break many of the game mechanics and redender models like trash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhVdb4K1M-M <- Sa comparisons as an example
(Note: I know you are on about how mods / RE projects compete with offical releases from a product standpoint, not a quality standpoint. Just wanted to say that RS had their chance to improve the longevity of the older 3D titles and they fucked it up)
Nintendo released Super Mario 3D All Stars for a limited purchase window between Sept 2020 and March 2021. Super Mario 64 was included in its original 1996 glory, included a low frame rate, 4:3 aspect ratio, low res textures (iirc they were slightly improved). In fact, Nintendo’s bundle was literally a N64 emulator running on the switch.
At the same time, a group of reverse engineers had decompiled the original ROM, converted it to readable C, and added many improvements: 60FPS, widescreen support, high res textures, etc. Most notably, the project allowed them to compile the source code to native Switch architecture, which greatly improved performance and power consumption.
Most enthusiasts would agree that the “fan project” is objectively a better experience.
In fact, I'd guess it's much more likely that the existence of such fan projects increases sales. Because it keep a conversation going about the IP. We can certainly say, an old IP that is not being talked about is essentially not selling.
Technically, that's correct of course. But realistically, how many people will build one of these projects from the source code they obtained from GitHub, download the game assets from somewhere and spend a lot of time to make it all work on their machine instead of just buying the remastered version? Some, sure, but I don't see Rockstar losing a lot of money here.
If I were in their shoes I would simply hire these developers. And leave their fan projects alone as a sign of good-will and generosity towards the community.
They released pre-built files. You download the stock version from steam like normal then unpack the pre-built files over the top replacing some of the original files (Just like many of the mods for these games).
I disagree. Sega can be an awful-bully when it comes to their IP. It wasn't until the SteamDB issue went viral that they backed-down [1] and the Streets of Rage remake. [2]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/sega-forces-mistaken-...
[2] https://www.destructoid.com/sega-has-streets-of-rage-remake-...
That doesn't provide the same buzz as ruinous legal action
I don't support this action by Take-Two but I think this is more of a legal situation rather than a, "How dare they try to rip off our game?" situation.
>After assessing its options, that’s exactly what the team did, leaving Take-Two just a couple of weeks to file a lawsuit to prevent the content reappearing on Github. When that time expired, the coding platform restored ‘re3’ and ‘reVC’, as per the law.
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty generous take on what happened.
The Take-Two counter notice [1] was filed by td512, who had a fork of the re3 repo, but doesn't seem to have any commits in the repo, so it's kinda hard to call him part of the team. And his reasoning for filing the counter notice was that the repo contained "no code owned by Take Two", which is a bit questionable (I guess it's now up for the court to decide) since the code is decompiled and then cleaned up. Meanwhile in May, Ash R., who I believe is part of the re3 team (and is in fact beind sued as Doe 1), posted on Twitter [2] about how the team was close to filing a counter notice before the news of the repo being restored hit the news, potentially tanking the whole project.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/04/2021-04-0...
[2] https://twitter.com/Ash_735/status/1391916368166113280
EDIT: Actually, it looks like there are two more counter claims as per the suit, however they seem to have been filed after the initial counter claim was filed and indeed after the repository was restored / news of the restoration were reported on. The first [3] seems like a carbon copy of the first claim while the second one [4] seems a bit more carefully worded.
[3] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/05/2021-05-1...
[4] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/06/2021-06-1...
> “In at least three separate instances between April and June of 2021, Defendants Orçunus, Morra, and Graber submitted sworn counter notifications to GitHub claiming the takedown of the repositories was mistaken or otherwise not legitimate,” the lawsuit reads.
> “Take-Two is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that these counter notifications were made in bad faith, and knowingly and deliberately misrepresented to GitHub the contents of the re3 GitHub Repositories.”
It really isn’t fair to put all of this legalese in front of laypeople (and in this case, laypeople in other countries/legal systems) and then allow highly experienced corporate attorneys to nitpick their obviously inadequate understanding of the language and its implications.
Hearing of ReVC just now made me consider buying it, a 20 year old game. Take-Twos belligerent approach just killed that consideration. They have fans both hardcore enough to restore the game and loving enough to provide the restored version to others, and they choose to slap them with a lawsuit over a 20 year old game?
We the people don’t have the right to distribute copyrighted files, but we do have a right to repair broken software, just like we have the right to repair other things we own, and we certainly have a right to help others do the same.
That might change if it goes viral tho.
Seeing how the recent GTA:SA releases perform, that's quite easy to achieve. Makes me think there should be some legal contemplation that if you don't actively distribute or charge for this stuff you get to do it anyhow.
Is there some sort of IP reason, like they need to defend the IP lest it be marked as being abandoned? Or is there some other legit reason beyond spite that they are taking this on? I dont see Take-Two losing any significant amount of income from this enthusiast project, but I could be wrong and I am willing to be corrected.
I thought that was only trademarks?
I don't do much IP personally, but I'm familiar enough to have seen that a lot of people, even judges, don't always draw those technical clear lines between different types of IP. So, going both ways -- it's not unthinkable that someone would try to
1) apply this reasoning but with copyright and/or
2) claim (if flimisily) that this is trademark infringement, despite it not exactly fitting with how the law is supposed to work.
Does anyone know the legal status of this project?
I make a board game and give away instructions on how to play the game. The game instructions include going out and buying Lego pieces to assemble the boardgame. Lego now wants to make boardgames and sues me. Is what I'm doing illegal?