3 ms·
Make sure to stash the copy of the source code somewhere before Rockstar copyright mafia comes and takes it down, like they did with the original re3: https://
by homebrewer 2y ago
Make sure to stash the copy of the source code somewhere before Rockstar copyright mafia comes and takes it down, like they did with the original re3:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26199879
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago[flagged]
- nirav72 2y agoNo other person. nor GP said that Rockstar doesn’t have a right to their IP.
- jjulius 2y agoIf you were talking about a much more recently released game for a current gen console, sure. Instead, we're talking about a 23 year-old game with numerous predecessors (including one on the way), on a 26 year-old console that hasn't been manufactured in 23 years. The number of people who will go to the effort of playing this pales tremendously in comparison to the rest of Rockstar's active market. There's next to no loss for them here. And also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562089
- bobthepanda 2y agoGTA III was recently remastered so this isn’t strictly true that it has no impact on Rockstar at all.
- jjulius 2y ago>... this isn't strictly true that it has no impact on Rockstar at all. You're right, but you're right because you're arguing against a statement/point I never made. :) There's "next to no loss" (I did choose my words carefully...) because people will continue to buy the remastered versions for the consoles they were released for. The only segment of people Rockstar may or may not lose out to are the people who are going to go to the effort to port this to an old, defunct console (one that Rockstar doesn't even see profitability in, since they don't have a version for it), but even then this project requires a legally purchased copy of the game in order to get started. So now we're into a fun legal/moral area of, "I've purchased this game legally, and I've purchased this console legally, and now I would like to use both together".
- lizardking 2y agoFor Dreamcast?
- wkat4242 2y agoRemastered for dreamcast? Right.. They didn't even bother to release san Andreas for the Oculus quest after promoting it. And the remaster was really bad quality.
- ziml77 2y agoThey brought the impact on themselves by having the remaster be a rebuild of the crappy mobile port. One of the most well known games ever and they treated it like trash. Digital Foundry did a video back when it released detailing the problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1JJt7xHTlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1JJt7xHTlE
- wtetzner 2y agoThe Dreamcast port requires a purchased copy of the game for the assets, so if anything I'd expect it to drive more sales.
- HideousKojima 2y ago>There's next to no loss for them here. If anything, going after the people making this would be a greater loss than just letting it exist. Lawyers ain't free.
- y33t 2y agoFor most people yes, but Rockstar probably has a salaried legal dept with nothing better to do.
- urbandw311er 2y agoIf they had nothing better to do then they’d fire half of them.
- anon_e-moose 2y agoYou overestimate managerial competence and underestimate misaligned incentives and the ability of people to justify the existence of their jobs by inflating the importance of useless tasks to management.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoNone of which makes the game not their property. It's their right to prevent people from doing this if they want. I don't disagree that they shouldn't, but ownership doesn't hinge on the recency of the work nor the profitability of it.
- jonhohle 2y agoThey could defend, but there is significant precedent to allow decompilation and reverse engineering and even Nintendo won’t go after projects that decompile code, but don’t include original artwork or audio (hence the need to supply your own copy of the game for this port).
- Hamuko 2y agoLegal precedent?
- realusername 2y agoYes, that's why the laws need to be changed to get a fairer ownership system on older titles.
- F7F7F7 2y agoIf you don’t defend it. A court could tell you one day it’s not yours to defend.
- Forgeties79 2y agoThis gets repeated so frequently online it’s bordering on an (inaccurate) trueism because people vastly overestimate how at-risk entities are for losing their IP. A niche Dreamcast project is not a threat to Rockstar. They’re not going to look up one day at a reality where due to piracy the courts strip one of the largest video game companies in the world of their core IP. Frankly that’s too ridiculous to even consider a possibility.
- LocalH 2y agoThis is 100% false in terms of copyright. This only applies to trademarks.
- jeroenhd 2y agoThere is some loss for them here, Take2 has invested a lot of money into getting a mobile games porting company to port the game to phones and then back to PC as a "re-release". Fans just fixing the original game so it runs on their platform of choice and running that rather than buying the much inferior remasters will hurt their bottom line and make their bad investments even worse. And, of course, current copyright law doesn't care about good will, it's there to protect the interests of the copyright industry, although the AI industry seems to get away with blatant copyright infringement as long as the copied contents are passed through a model as an intermediary step. As far as I can tell, Rockstar doesn't really care all that much, it's the suits at the top of the publishing chain that do the legal threats.
- bingaweek 2y agoI can't stand these one like twitter-style bitchposts. It already starts off obnoxious and sarcastic, and for what, defending Rockstar from the evils of Dreamcast homebrew?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- s5300 2y ago[dead]
- mepian 2y agoIs that boot tasty?
- dude187 2y agoWhat parts of the code did they write?
- Hamuko 2y agoOf the re3 project? Most of it, since it's decompiled from the GTA 3 executable. And just because compiled code is decompiled doesn't strip it of ownership/copyright.
- realusername 2y agoShould the re-created code be considered as a derivative in copyright terms? It's kind of a gray area to me as there's so much work on interpretation involved in decompilation. It's very unlikely the decompiled code looks anything like the original source code. It would be nice to have a leak of the original source code someday to compare but I'm betting it's very different. On librw, it's a clearer since it's a reimplementation.
- ThatPlayer 2y agoI don't think you would be able to convince a court of that because analogies will be made to existing types of works. Would an adaptation of a book to a movie be any different? One that involves interpretation and thousands of man-hours in set design, actors, special effects, director, etc. You can additionally argue it's a translation. From machine code to readable source code. Translation are directly covered by copyright law already.
- realusername 2y agoUnlike a book or a movie, the people doing the interpretation do not have access to the source material. The best analogy for me is a reproduction of an artwork without using it as a base material and that would not be covered by derivative laws I think. > You can additionally argue it's a translation. From machine code to readable source code. Translation are directly covered by copyright law already. What's under copyright isn't exactly the binary, it's the translation of the source code to the binary because the source code is what's copyrighted at the end of the day. Here the line is much muddier since the end result has nothing to do with the copyrighted work.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Lammy 2y agoIt's a 25 year old game. It belongs to everyone now. Fuck perpetual copyright and anybody who supports it.
- IntelMiner 2y agoPreserving art? Fuck that. Embrace private ownership!
- oarsinsync 2y agoRe3 is online again, however, in some form at least: https://github.com/halpz/re3/ https://github.com/halpz/re3/
- prmoustache 2y agoNot sure why would they do that as the re3 engine require a copy of the game to run.
- rollcat 2y agoWe're living in a world of frivolous take-down demands, where the law says shoot first, ask questions later, and all the power is concentrated with the copyright mafia. (How meta.)
- Salgat 2y agoRetro games are highly lucrative. They don't want any competition to remasters and rereleases, which require a new purchase. Nintendo has been doing this "release the same game every 5-10 years" bs since the Wii (ironically often using ROMs found on the internet).
- deaddodo 2y agoRE3 was a reverse engineered product. It used the original source and logic to derive an ABI compatible implementation. This has always been a grey area-outright illegal activity. It's the entire reason Compaq clean room engineered (or, at the very least, claimed to) their BIOS all the way back in 1982. Every time I hear people complain about this, I just have to roll my eyes. Go do a clean room implementation like OpenRA and you're legally pretty safe. Use their IP and you're just asking for them to easily shut you down once you catch enough attention.
- farias0 2y agoPeople are complaining about it because they think it's unfair and it's abuse of IP law. People's interests aren't defined by court decisions.
- deaddodo 2y agoYour example is akin to there being a very clear "No Jaywalking sign", jaywalking anyways because you see no traffic/others doing it, having a cop hit you with a ticket, and then complaining that the cop is abusing his power. No, you just got caught; and are whining. Society has decided they don't want people doing that. If you don't like it, convince enough of your peers to change it; or accept that the society you're in doesn't agree with you. Welcome to democracy.
- account42 2y agoExactly, jaywalking is also a made up crime that benefits some (car users) at the expense of everyone else. Just like copyright it is a bad deal for society and should be ignored whenever possible. Reclaim pedestrian spaces AND reclaim your culture!