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> As draconian and litigious as Nintendo is about these things, previous projects of this type have managed to avoid the gaze of its lawyers so far. [...] The r

> As draconian and litigious as Nintendo is about these things, previous projects of this type have managed to avoid the gaze of its lawyers so far. [...] The reason is probably because projects like these don't really infringe on any of Nintendo's intellectual property. Coders like Roseman aren't just ripping Nintendo's assets (like textures) out of their games and slapping them onto the PC, instead, they're remaking the code themselves, which Nintendo has yet to find a way to crack down on. How is this is even remotely legal. They have literally decompiled Nintendo's binary -- up to the point the decompiled sources build to a binary with the same checksum -- and are now redistributing it. There's absolutely no interoperability motivation or any other type of DMCA exemption that would apply here. It's like claiming that the art assets are subject to copyright but not the program.

Waterluvian 4y ago
A very common theme I see among groups who commit time to these game remake/remaster/port passion projects is that they seem quite willfully ignorant of what the law is and shocked when the obvious outcome comes to pass. And then some site like Kotaku picks it up and frames them sympathetically, so Nintendo becomes “draconian” when it is doing exactly what it needs to do: protect its IP and business. What I’m fascinated by is just how much free work people throw into obviously doomed projects. And now they’re doing all kinds of acrobatics hoping to find some loophole. I think this suggests just how strongly emotionally attached people can become to games they grew up with. I can definitely sympathize. But also… if you’re this talented… make the world a new game. Make A Hat in Time if you love Banjo Kazooie so much. Make Stardew Valley if you love Harvest Moon so much!
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > A very common theme I see among groups who commit time to these game remake/remaster/port passion projects is that they seem quite willfully ignorant of what the law is and shocked when the obvious outcome comes to pass. [..]I think this suggests just how strongly emotionally attached people can become to games they grew up with. I have also seen it in non-game projects, e.g. retro OS reimplementations. I am not even sure where this misconception comes: that you can just decompile the original software, rearrange the source files a bit and that's it! . Even otherwise smart people actually believe this. It's incredibly damaging and pervasive thinking; by now I have to mistrust all new "miracle" contributors that come up with significant amounts of code.
- lukeschlather 4y ago
  The DMCA explicitly says you're allowed to do this sort of thing for interoperability. IP law is very complicated. Really, as long as you have a license for the game this doesn't seem like it ought to be any different from time-shifting with a VCR. You buy an N64, you buy the game. You copy the game to another medium, decompile it, make it work on a different machine. Your N64 and the original cartridge are inoperable due to age but your license is still good. This does not give you a license to distribute, but at the same time the law is somewhat contradictory on this point, and it makes sense that it is contradictory because it's obvious that a strict interpretation would make it practically impossible for anyone to retain the license to the game, and the license is supposed to be perpetual. Nintendo of course, wants to "sell" you the same game more than once, but it's also obvious that this is not consistent with the intent of the law.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    > The DMCA explicitly says you're allowed to do this sort of thing for interoperability It simply does not, specially in the US where EULAs can force you to sign away rights you may otherwise have e.g. https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq But this is not reverse engineering, this is outright decompiling the copyrighted code, and then distributing it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HiccupJul 4y ago
  >A very common theme I see[...] is that they seem quite willfully ignorant of what the law is and shocked when the obvious outcome comes to pass.[...]obviously doomed projects I'm skeptical about this idea that these people are ignorant and that these projects are doomed. Where have you seen this?
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    re3/revc was pretty doomed and ended up with Take-Two taking down the repositories with a DMCA claim, which a couple of people filed counter-claims against and Take-Two took them to court. Although it seems that Take-Two has since settled out of court.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - HiccupJul 4y ago
      While that's unfortunate, the project doesn't look doomed to me. But they should have been more careful given Rockstar's reputation.
dtx1 4y ago
Who says they decompiled it? They Guessed C-Code that happens to compile to the same binary as the original game. That doesnt even mean the code they generated is the same as the original, compilers could be optimizing very different looking code to the same binary representation
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  The title of the article seems to suggest it.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >Who says they decompiled it? "The game's assembly code is manually decompiled into C source code." https://papermar.io/ https://papermar.io/
  - dtx1 4y ago
    That seems unwise to write then^^
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      The whole project was unwise from the beginning, so it's no wonder they would also write unwise things about the project. I remember the GTA 3 decompilation project (re3) guys posting videos of themselves working with the IDA output that they got from the GTA 3 binaries. Probably also a very crappy idea from a legal perspective.
chc4 4y ago
It's not legal. That's not a real legal defense, and the article author just doesn't know IP or copywrite law.
bobsmooth 4y ago
Reverse engineering is legal. The files that they distribute don't contain the copyrighted assets needed to actually play the game.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  This is not reverse engineering by any definition of the word. Even in my country, where looking at the copyrighted code is legal when it is done for "interoperability" purposes, you just CAN'T decompile the thing, ship it and call it a day. My implementation being remotely similar to the original one would get me into trouble. Here, they are distributing literally a clone of the original game, down to the same checksum. Not only it is a useless legal defense, it is absolutely idiotic to think that it would be. And in many countries of the world (including the US), not even looking at the copyrighted code is necessarily allowed. See the entire clean room thing.
  - DoctorNick 4y ago
    Fun fact: there is no legal precedent in the US that states that clean room RE is required to avoid copyright infringement. It’s just been assumed.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  >Reverse engineering is legal. Depends on how you reverse engineer. If you just throw a compiled binary into a decompiler, rename the variables and release that, you're probably breaking the copyright law in whichever country you reside.
derefr 4y ago
When someone sues over their rights of source-code-as-text (complaining about e.g. a GPL violation; or in such famous cases as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....), they're suing about copyright infringement. This is analogous to suing over copyright infringement about the prose text of a book or article. I think it's enlightening to consider the places where people do and don't sue for copyright infringement of prose text works, as a model for the places where you can and cannot do that for source code. Copyright is about protecting the rights-holder's ability to determine where the exact copyrighted source material can be used. Copyright does not offer the rights-holder protection for all works with equivalent semantics (that'd be a patent.) For copyright to pertain, the work has to be "textually identical", or — if we want to apply considerations about "sampling" — has to have "textually identical" sections borrowed into the derivative work. This means that, in both the "prose text" and "source code" cases, all you have to do to avoid copyright, is to retain all the same semantics, but replace all the individual words. Note that this falls under what academia would call "plagiarism" — but there's no law that protects an IP rights-holder from having their work plagiarized. In prose, this process of plagiarizing a work by replacing all the words, is often euphemistically called "paraphrasing." As far as the law is concerned, it is no different than actual paraphrasing — of digesting the original into your mental model and then attempting to describe the same idea in your own words. Even though, very likely, the structure of the original has been retained in your plagiarized derivative. 90% of the news articles you read are this sort of plagiarized paraphrase of some other news article — the article that "breaks the story." There is nothing the original journalist who breaks the story can do about that, under the law, because the paraphrases aren't literal word-for-word renditions of their copyrighted text. In code, this is called "renaming all the identifiers." Which is something that happens inherently in decompilation, because all the original names for the identifiers got thrown away when the original code was compiled. --- Also, to be clear on two issues, because surprisingly nobody in the thread has clarified this yet: 1. In these decompiled game projects, the original game's copyrighted binary-asset representations — which you'd need to byte-for-byte reproduce the game, and which you can't really "rephrase" as above — are not stored in any encoded form in the decompilation's source-code repo. Nor are any representations of assets — characters, logos, etc — to which trademark applies. Rather, for both of these cases, the build framework for the decompiled project contains logic to extract these assets from an external ROM image of the original game that must be supplied at build time. Or you could just as well supply a different ROM image — your own "asset pack", per se — to get a compiled game that is free of such assets. This means that the decompilation project forms the basis of a tool that can be used to create a work that is byte-for-byte identical to the original — provided you have... a ROM image of the original to feed into it. You know what else matches that description? A file copy utility. (The project can also produce binaries that are not identical to the original — and that's usually the goal of the project, making e.g. PC ports of the original game, which are for entirely different target ISAs and so entirely are different object code from the copyrighted released object code.) 2. The decompilation project never publishes anywhere, the thing that it builds when you run it. Doing so would violate copyright. Just like if Rifftrax actually combined their audio dub track with an original movie and distributed that, that'd be a copyright violation. But, in both cases, it's not a copyright violation to give the end-user a tool to create a derivative work from an original, and tell the user to apply the tool to the original themselves, to derive this combined work for their own private consumption.
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
On the contrary there is a pretty clear and unambiguous interoperability motivation here. The goal is literally to run the game on plateform it wasn’t intended for. I am not going to pronounce myself on it being or not a copyright violation in any and all countries of the world. As most of the people having strong opinions here, I’m not an expert nor that knowledgeable on the question. Impressive feat of decompilation anyway.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > The goal is literally to run the game on plateform it wasn’t intended for. If to do that you would had to dissasembly the ROM of the Nintendo 64, or of some protection routine in the game, or you were writing an emulator (i.e. another program to interoperate with), it _may_ have been fair game. However looking at the code of the very game you intend to create clones of is not going to fly in any jurisdiction I know of. Much less literally creating the cloned games by directly copying the original game's code in its entirety. There is just no way to justify this.
  - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
    > If to do that you would had to dissasembly the ROM of the Nintendo 64, or of some protection routine in the game, or you were writing an emulator (i.e. another program to interoperate with), it _may_ have been fair game. However looking at the code of the very game you intend to create clones of is not going to fly in any jurisdiction I know of. I am eagerly awaiting the jurisprudence supporting that. Because if you have nothing to quote, giving your opinion very forcefully doesn’t magically make it more than your opinion. Armchair layers are in full swing today. I am very curious to know how all of you know so well where the border between what is and isn’t acceptable is.
    - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
      So: on one side we have the opinions of the people who create and defend open source software licenses, and of the majority of the software industry 'per se'; on the other side we have the opinion of a single videogames reporter who apparently believes there exists a magical piece of software called a 'decompiler' where: in comes all kinds of copyright encumbered software, and out comes clean, free-from-restrictions source code you are free to redistribute to anyone without any authorization whatsoever. Yes, sorry if I tend to at least initially trust the opinion that does not _completely_ destroy all software licenses in place today. This is a forum where software developers comprise a large % of the audience. > "I am eagerly awaiting the jurisprudence supporting that." I say that if I castrate people without their consent it is OK, as long as I only do it using properly sterilized scalpels in accordance to current medical practice. You say I can't. I am eagerly awaiting the jurisprudence supporting that.
circuit10 4y ago
I wonder if doing something like the xor thing that people are doing with LLaMa fine tunes would be enough (though you’d probably want something a bit more secure, I feel like you could recover the data form just an xor of two completely different types of data) That seems fair to everyone but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about if it’s legal
causality0 4y ago
How can you violate copyright if you don't copy anything?
tenebrisalietum 4y ago
> How is this is even remotely legal. They have literally decompiled Nintendo's binary -- up to the point the decompiled sources build to a binary with the same checksum -- and are now redistributing it. This is like not being allowed to burn CDs on your PC because you can potentially use them to burn a copyrighted .ISO. I think that media companies tried to take that away in the VCR days but failed. Another similar situation: ID Software open-sourced their DOOM code, but not the art assets. So you have a bunch of DOOM engines, including enhanced ones like GZDoom, BOOM, etc. Which you can download, but you only get the engine and none of the WAD files which contain the levels, sound and graphics. So you can then use freely available assets like Freedoom or other packs that are out there, or use ones from your existing legal copy of DOOM.

Waterluvian 4y ago

A very common theme I see among groups who commit time to these game remake/remaster/port passion projects is that they seem quite willfully ignorant of what the law is and shocked when the obvious outcome comes to pass. And then some site like Kotaku picks it up and frames them sympathetically, so Nintendo becomes “draconian” when it is doing exactly what it needs to do: protect its IP and business. What I’m fascinated by is just how much free work people throw into obviously doomed projects. And now they’re doing all kinds of acrobatics hoping to find some loophole. I think this suggests just how strongly emotionally attached people can become to games they grew up with. I can definitely sympathize. But also… if you’re this talented… make the world a new game. Make A Hat in Time if you love Banjo Kazooie so much. Make Stardew Valley if you love Harvest Moon so much!

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> A very common theme I see among groups who commit time to these game remake/remaster/port passion projects is that they seem quite willfully ignorant of what the law is and shocked when the obvious outcome comes to pass. [..]I think this suggests just how strongly emotionally attached people can become to games they grew up with. I have also seen it in non-game projects, e.g. retro OS reimplementations. I am not even sure where this misconception comes: that you can just decompile the original software, rearrange the source files a bit and that's it! . Even otherwise smart people actually believe this. It's incredibly damaging and pervasive thinking; by now I have to mistrust all new "miracle" contributors that come up with significant amounts of code.
lukeschlather 4y ago
The DMCA explicitly says you're allowed to do this sort of thing for interoperability. IP law is very complicated. Really, as long as you have a license for the game this doesn't seem like it ought to be any different from time-shifting with a VCR. You buy an N64, you buy the game. You copy the game to another medium, decompile it, make it work on a different machine. Your N64 and the original cartridge are inoperable due to age but your license is still good. This does not give you a license to distribute, but at the same time the law is somewhat contradictory on this point, and it makes sense that it is contradictory because it's obvious that a strict interpretation would make it practically impossible for anyone to retain the license to the game, and the license is supposed to be perpetual. Nintendo of course, wants to "sell" you the same game more than once, but it's also obvious that this is not consistent with the intent of the law.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  > The DMCA explicitly says you're allowed to do this sort of thing for interoperability It simply does not, specially in the US where EULAs can force you to sign away rights you may otherwise have e.g. https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq But this is not reverse engineering, this is outright decompiling the copyrighted code, and then distributing it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HiccupJul 4y ago
>A very common theme I see[...] is that they seem quite willfully ignorant of what the law is and shocked when the obvious outcome comes to pass.[...]obviously doomed projects I'm skeptical about this idea that these people are ignorant and that these projects are doomed. Where have you seen this?
- Hamuko 4y ago
  re3/revc was pretty doomed and ended up with Take-Two taking down the repositories with a DMCA claim, which a couple of people filed counter-claims against and Take-Two took them to court. Although it seems that Take-Two has since settled out of court.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - HiccupJul 4y ago
    While that's unfortunate, the project doesn't look doomed to me. But they should have been more careful given Rockstar's reputation.

dtx1 4y ago

Who says they decompiled it? They Guessed C-Code that happens to compile to the same binary as the original game. That doesnt even mean the code they generated is the same as the original, compilers could be optimizing very different looking code to the same binary representation

Waterluvian 4y ago
The title of the article seems to suggest it.
Hamuko 4y ago
>Who says they decompiled it? "The game's assembly code is manually decompiled into C source code." https://papermar.io/ https://papermar.io/
- dtx1 4y ago
  That seems unwise to write then^^
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    The whole project was unwise from the beginning, so it's no wonder they would also write unwise things about the project. I remember the GTA 3 decompilation project (re3) guys posting videos of themselves working with the IDA output that they got from the GTA 3 binaries. Probably also a very crappy idea from a legal perspective.

chc4 4y ago

It's not legal. That's not a real legal defense, and the article author just doesn't know IP or copywrite law.

bobsmooth 4y ago

Reverse engineering is legal. The files that they distribute don't contain the copyrighted assets needed to actually play the game.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
This is not reverse engineering by any definition of the word. Even in my country, where looking at the copyrighted code is legal when it is done for "interoperability" purposes, you just CAN'T decompile the thing, ship it and call it a day. My implementation being remotely similar to the original one would get me into trouble. Here, they are distributing literally a clone of the original game, down to the same checksum. Not only it is a useless legal defense, it is absolutely idiotic to think that it would be. And in many countries of the world (including the US), not even looking at the copyrighted code is necessarily allowed. See the entire clean room thing.
- DoctorNick 4y ago
  Fun fact: there is no legal precedent in the US that states that clean room RE is required to avoid copyright infringement. It’s just been assumed.
Hamuko 4y ago
>Reverse engineering is legal. Depends on how you reverse engineer. If you just throw a compiled binary into a decompiler, rename the variables and release that, you're probably breaking the copyright law in whichever country you reside.

derefr 4y ago

When someone sues over their rights of source-code-as-text (complaining about e.g. a GPL violation; or in such famous cases as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....), they're suing about copyright infringement. This is analogous to suing over copyright infringement about the prose text of a book or article. I think it's enlightening to consider the places where people do and don't sue for copyright infringement of prose text works, as a model for the places where you can and cannot do that for source code. Copyright is about protecting the rights-holder's ability to determine where the exact copyrighted source material can be used. Copyright does not offer the rights-holder protection for all works with equivalent semantics (that'd be a patent.) For copyright to pertain, the work has to be "textually identical", or — if we want to apply considerations about "sampling" — has to have "textually identical" sections borrowed into the derivative work. This means that, in both the "prose text" and "source code" cases, all you have to do to avoid copyright, is to retain all the same semantics, but replace all the individual words. Note that this falls under what academia would call "plagiarism" — but there's no law that protects an IP rights-holder from having their work plagiarized. In prose, this process of plagiarizing a work by replacing all the words, is often euphemistically called "paraphrasing." As far as the law is concerned, it is no different than actual paraphrasing — of digesting the original into your mental model and then attempting to describe the same idea in your own words. Even though, very likely, the structure of the original has been retained in your plagiarized derivative. 90% of the news articles you read are this sort of plagiarized paraphrase of some other news article — the article that "breaks the story." There is nothing the original journalist who breaks the story can do about that, under the law, because the paraphrases aren't literal word-for-word renditions of their copyrighted text. In code, this is called "renaming all the identifiers." Which is something that happens inherently in decompilation, because all the original names for the identifiers got thrown away when the original code was compiled. --- Also, to be clear on two issues, because surprisingly nobody in the thread has clarified this yet: 1. In these decompiled game projects, the original game's copyrighted binary-asset representations — which you'd need to byte-for-byte reproduce the game, and which you can't really "rephrase" as above — are not stored in any encoded form in the decompilation's source-code repo. Nor are any representations of assets — characters, logos, etc — to which trademark applies. Rather, for both of these cases, the build framework for the decompiled project contains logic to extract these assets from an external ROM image of the original game that must be supplied at build time. Or you could just as well supply a different ROM image — your own "asset pack", per se — to get a compiled game that is free of such assets. This means that the decompilation project forms the basis of a tool that can be used to create a work that is byte-for-byte identical to the original — provided you have... a ROM image of the original to feed into it. You know what else matches that description? A file copy utility. (The project can also produce binaries that are not identical to the original — and that's usually the goal of the project, making e.g. PC ports of the original game, which are for entirely different target ISAs and so entirely are different object code from the copyrighted released object code.) 2. The decompilation project never publishes anywhere, the thing that it builds when you run it. Doing so would violate copyright. Just like if Rifftrax actually combined their audio dub track with an original movie and distributed that, that'd be a copyright violation. But, in both cases, it's not a copyright violation to give the end-user a tool to create a derivative work from an original, and tell the user to apply the tool to the original themselves, to derive this combined work for their own private consumption.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

On the contrary there is a pretty clear and unambiguous interoperability motivation here. The goal is literally to run the game on plateform it wasn’t intended for. I am not going to pronounce myself on it being or not a copyright violation in any and all countries of the world. As most of the people having strong opinions here, I’m not an expert nor that knowledgeable on the question. Impressive feat of decompilation anyway.

AshamedCaptain 4y ago
> The goal is literally to run the game on plateform it wasn’t intended for. If to do that you would had to dissasembly the ROM of the Nintendo 64, or of some protection routine in the game, or you were writing an emulator (i.e. another program to interoperate with), it _may_ have been fair game. However looking at the code of the very game you intend to create clones of is not going to fly in any jurisdiction I know of. Much less literally creating the cloned games by directly copying the original game's code in its entirety. There is just no way to justify this.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  > If to do that you would had to dissasembly the ROM of the Nintendo 64, or of some protection routine in the game, or you were writing an emulator (i.e. another program to interoperate with), it _may_ have been fair game. However looking at the code of the very game you intend to create clones of is not going to fly in any jurisdiction I know of. I am eagerly awaiting the jurisprudence supporting that. Because if you have nothing to quote, giving your opinion very forcefully doesn’t magically make it more than your opinion. Armchair layers are in full swing today. I am very curious to know how all of you know so well where the border between what is and isn’t acceptable is.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    So: on one side we have the opinions of the people who create and defend open source software licenses, and of the majority of the software industry 'per se'; on the other side we have the opinion of a single videogames reporter who apparently believes there exists a magical piece of software called a 'decompiler' where: in comes all kinds of copyright encumbered software, and out comes clean, free-from-restrictions source code you are free to redistribute to anyone without any authorization whatsoever. Yes, sorry if I tend to at least initially trust the opinion that does not _completely_ destroy all software licenses in place today. This is a forum where software developers comprise a large % of the audience. > "I am eagerly awaiting the jurisprudence supporting that." I say that if I castrate people without their consent it is OK, as long as I only do it using properly sterilized scalpels in accordance to current medical practice. You say I can't. I am eagerly awaiting the jurisprudence supporting that.

circuit10 4y ago

I wonder if doing something like the xor thing that people are doing with LLaMa fine tunes would be enough (though you’d probably want something a bit more secure, I feel like you could recover the data form just an xor of two completely different types of data) That seems fair to everyone but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about if it’s legal

causality0 4y ago

How can you violate copyright if you don't copy anything?

tenebrisalietum 4y ago

> How is this is even remotely legal. They have literally decompiled Nintendo's binary -- up to the point the decompiled sources build to a binary with the same checksum -- and are now redistributing it. This is like not being allowed to burn CDs on your PC because you can potentially use them to burn a copyrighted .ISO. I think that media companies tried to take that away in the VCR days but failed. Another similar situation: ID Software open-sourced their DOOM code, but not the art assets. So you have a bunch of DOOM engines, including enhanced ones like GZDoom, BOOM, etc. Which you can download, but you only get the engine and none of the WAD files which contain the levels, sound and graphics. So you can then use freely available assets like Freedoom or other packs that are out there, or use ones from your existing legal copy of DOOM.