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> 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

> 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.

Const-me 5y ago
> 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 https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Rakin_and_Ponzer
- klodolph 5y ago
  > That’s not what these people did. 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.
  - Const-me 5y ago
    > 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?
    - klodolph 5y ago
      > I wonder was that tested in a court? 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.
      - Const-me 5y ago
        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.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
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.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  >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.
- klodolph 5y ago
  It's decompiled and cleaned up. 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: uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockHours = *(uint8*)0x95CDA6; uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockMinutes = *(uint8*)0x95CDC8; uint16 &CClock::ms_nGameClockSeconds = *(uint16*)0x95CC7C; 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.
dognotdog 5y ago
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.
- klodolph 5y ago
  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.
realusername 5y ago
> 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.

Const-me 5y ago

> 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 https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Rakin_and_Ponzer

klodolph 5y ago
> That’s not what these people did. 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.
- Const-me 5y ago
  > 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?
  - klodolph 5y ago
    > I wonder was that tested in a court? 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.
    - Const-me 5y ago
      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.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

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.

Hamuko 5y ago
>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.
klodolph 5y ago
It's decompiled and cleaned up. 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: uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockHours = *(uint8*)0x95CDA6; uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockMinutes = *(uint8*)0x95CDC8; uint16 &CClock::ms_nGameClockSeconds = *(uint16*)0x95CC7C; 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.

dognotdog 5y ago

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.

klodolph 5y ago
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.

realusername 5y ago

> 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.