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Why would implementing a compatible game engine be unlawful? The code he wrote is copyrighted but the concepts and functional elements embodied by his code shou
by matheusmoreira 11mo ago
Why would implementing a compatible game engine be unlawful? The code he wrote is copyrighted but the concepts and functional elements embodied by his code shouldn't be protected.
- jcranmer 11mo agoOpenRCT2 and OpenTTD are, at best, derivative works, if not outright infringement (the line between infringement and derivative in computer code is quite muddy, and there is very little in the way of precedence to illuminate the difference). These projects are not like WINE or ReactOS, reimplementing something by carefully observing what it does and attempting to reproduce it, but rather built (originally) by decompiling the original and otherwise heavily reliant on outright reuse of parts of the original.
- Starlevel004 11mo agoOpenRCT2 was a direct derivative of RCT2 at first, to the point it would just directly call into the game executable everywhere. See e.g: https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/commit/643db7ae017e04d13980031b449d747e3bf89c22 https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/commit/643db7ae017e04d1...
- matheusmoreira 11mo agoI see. Yeah it's hard to defend that. The correct way to do it would be to reverse engineer the game and produce a clean room implementation.
- estimator7292 11mo agoThat isn't derivative. That's a plugin. At that point if OpenRCT2 is calling into the original, intact binary, there can be no infringement. You're just running the executable as provided and your computer just so happens to have another program running in the same memory space.