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> The kind of reverse engineering ZRET do is made legal because the fans involved did not use any leaked content. IANAL, but - there's no way that can be true.
by CyberShadow 5y ago
> The kind of reverse engineering ZRET do is made legal because the fans involved did not use any leaked content.
IANAL, but - there's no way that can be true. Reverse engineering of machine code is generally forbidden except for very specific exemptions, like compatibility with other systems. Furthermore, even under such exemptions, you are still generally not allowed to share the results.
Even putting reverse engineering aside, they are still distributing code that was written by Nintendo (although meticulously transformed in a way that makes reading and modification much easier), and which still belongs to them.
What would have been legal is if either this was a black box reverse engineering effort, in which all code was written without ever looking at the original machine code, or releasing a tool which fully automatically decompiles the ROM (which is not included with the tool, and must be acquired separately, probably from dumping a cartridge).
(Had to research this subject a bit as part of my collaboration on https://github.com/Davidebyzero/Snipes https://github.com/Davidebyzero/Snipes)
- Pulcinella 5y agoYeah this article is very unclear. It talks about decompiling from existing code (namely the GameCube master quest version) but also recreating the game from scratch. Which is it?
- naikrovek 5y agoprobably both. singular approaches rarely work for everything when reverse engineering.
- xyzzy_plugh 5y agoIANAL either but it really depends on your jurisdiction. There are many places outside North America where it is quite legal to RE without a black box.
- lbrito 5y agoWow, that's a really quaint acronym. Kudos.
- jsd1982 5y ago> Reverse engineering of machine code is generally forbidden except for very specific exemptions, like compatibility with other systems Reverse engineering is generally legal in the US, except in cases where a EULA expressly forbids it. Since n64 titles are not covered by EULAs, to the best of my knowledge, reverse engineering them is perfectly legal. Distribution of such results however may not be.
- CyberShadow 5y agoGood to know. Perhaps the US law makes more sense here, because banning reverse engineering by itself is not really enforceable. For Europe there is the EU Directive 2009/24/EC, and I think I remember reading something almost like that predating it by many years in some country's (possibly mine) legislation.
- Jansen312 5y agoLegality requires to be tested in court. Until it is, anything is technically neither legal nor illegal unless you opt to not contest it in court when exerted by other parties.
- naikrovek 5y agoit can probably be argued that the effort put in by people surpasses the requirement for derivative work, and it should go without saying that without the ROM (or other source of assets such as sounds, art, and music) that the code in question compiles into something that doesn't function. this isn't the result of a single tool doing the work, but a lot of tools and a lot of people looking at the output of those tools and interpreting that output, then changing it to make sense within the scope of the project framework(s). probably very similar to an emulator for a single game. I am also not a lawyer.
- Wowfunhappy 5y agoWhich also makes me wonder, if it's not legal anyway... was the Ocarina of Time source not included in the major Nintendo leak from last year? A lot of other stuff from that era certainly was...
- azeirah 5y agoNo, the source code was not leaked. Only a bunch of assets.
- ABCLAW 5y agoJust as an FYI to casual readers, I'd take the above post with a large dose of skepticism. If I'd wager a guess, the research in question was performed during Google v. Oracle winding it's way through the courts, because for a period there was concern that Sony v. Connectix and the other leading cases in the area were about to be tossed aside, which ultimately didn't happen.
- CyberShadow 5y agoSorry, that's off the mark.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoWas the code written by Nintendo? They wrote c code that compiles into the Zelda game but if we were to look at Nintendo's source I can guarantee it's different than what this team produced.
- footlose_3815 5y agoit’s in C, not machine code?