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I say this every time it comes up, but polluting a decomp project with AI generated code is risky, imho. What makes decomp legal (in the US) is that it’s a crea

I say this every time it comes up, but polluting a decomp project with AI generated code is risky, imho. What makes decomp legal (in the US) is that it’s a creative transformation performed by a human and the resulting copyright of the code that just happens to compile to the same binary is owned by the person doing the decompiling. USPTO and court precedent is leaning heavily toward LLM output not being transformative on its own, making it mechanical, and no longer fair use and in violation of copyright. This puts a legal gray cloud on a project where most contributors couldn’t defend themselves if a rights holder goes after it, and there’s a high likelihood that they would succeed. On the other hand there’s enough case law protecting human decompilation that even the most litigious game companies don’t go after decomp projects that have historically been done by humans. (I’m not a lawyer, I’m not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc., etc.)

asiekierka 4mo ago
Does it being a creative transformation rob the derivative work status? Personally, I'd liken the process of decompilation to that of translating a book from one language to another - the copyright on the original work does not become void merely because the process of translation requires extensive creativity. Nicalis and Take-Two have both gone after decompilation projects, also. In particular, Nicalis has gone after a decompilation of Cave Story, but not a black box reimplementation of the same, while Take-Two ended up suing a decompilation developer (albeit settled out of court). However, in some jurisdictions, even clean reimplementations have failed - see Tetris v. Xio. (I am not a lawyer either, etc etc, but that's my understanding)
- jonhohle 4mo ago
  The RE3 devs were distributing binaries. This is known to be an issue. The source code is theirs, binaries mixed with other copyrighted content is not. They also allegedly violated a EULA, but I haven’t looked closely into that. CSE2 was distributing binaries as well. So was SM64 decomp and Nintendo told them to stop, they did and continued to share their source code. Tetris v. Xio is unrelated to reverse engineering or decompilation.
  - paavohtl 4mo ago
    > The source code is theirs, binaries mixed with other copyrighted content is not. Distributing binaries should not matter. If the binary is just compiled from the source code, the binary is just an (non-)infringing as the source code. > They also allegedly violated a EULA Meaningless. EULAs are not the law.
    - jonhohle 4mo ago
      If the sources produce significant sequences that match the original binary, that binary is probably infringing. The community gets around this by distributing binary patches instead. In some cases the EULA is what gives you access to the original binary to begin with (often the case with digital marketplaces, but also true of some physical media after 2010 or so). These have little to do with copyright, but whether someone could access the binary on the first place. To the best of my knowledge this contract law has largely been considered valid, but I try to avoid working on things with EULAs, so haven’t looked into it in depth.
charcircuit 4mo ago
These decomp projects are already violating copyright by distributing the decompiled source code. Using LLMs is less risky than sharing the code.
- skelpmargyar 4mo ago
  Can you please elaborate on why distributing decompiled source code is violating copyright? And Nintendo is litigious, if it was black and white surely they would have taken down everything by now? How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already?
  - charcircuit 4mo ago
    Because it is clearly a derivative work. The very fact these projects strive to be byte perfect shows that they want to be a copy of the original. These people are not creating a new original work which happens to be similar to a game. >Nintendo is litigious But they don't go after every copyright violation. They have a few categories of violations that they focus on. For example go to YouTube and search "pokemon music" and you'll find an endless list of copyright infringement. This doesn't even include the videos people make using pokemon music as background music. >How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already? It doesn't matter since the risk of it being an issue is low.

asiekierka 4mo ago

Does it being a creative transformation rob the derivative work status? Personally, I'd liken the process of decompilation to that of translating a book from one language to another - the copyright on the original work does not become void merely because the process of translation requires extensive creativity. Nicalis and Take-Two have both gone after decompilation projects, also. In particular, Nicalis has gone after a decompilation of Cave Story, but not a black box reimplementation of the same, while Take-Two ended up suing a decompilation developer (albeit settled out of court). However, in some jurisdictions, even clean reimplementations have failed - see Tetris v. Xio. (I am not a lawyer either, etc etc, but that's my understanding)

jonhohle 4mo ago
The RE3 devs were distributing binaries. This is known to be an issue. The source code is theirs, binaries mixed with other copyrighted content is not. They also allegedly violated a EULA, but I haven’t looked closely into that. CSE2 was distributing binaries as well. So was SM64 decomp and Nintendo told them to stop, they did and continued to share their source code. Tetris v. Xio is unrelated to reverse engineering or decompilation.
- paavohtl 4mo ago
  > The source code is theirs, binaries mixed with other copyrighted content is not. Distributing binaries should not matter. If the binary is just compiled from the source code, the binary is just an (non-)infringing as the source code. > They also allegedly violated a EULA Meaningless. EULAs are not the law.
  - jonhohle 4mo ago
    If the sources produce significant sequences that match the original binary, that binary is probably infringing. The community gets around this by distributing binary patches instead. In some cases the EULA is what gives you access to the original binary to begin with (often the case with digital marketplaces, but also true of some physical media after 2010 or so). These have little to do with copyright, but whether someone could access the binary on the first place. To the best of my knowledge this contract law has largely been considered valid, but I try to avoid working on things with EULAs, so haven’t looked into it in depth.

charcircuit 4mo ago

These decomp projects are already violating copyright by distributing the decompiled source code. Using LLMs is less risky than sharing the code.

skelpmargyar 4mo ago
Can you please elaborate on why distributing decompiled source code is violating copyright? And Nintendo is litigious, if it was black and white surely they would have taken down everything by now? How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already?
- charcircuit 4mo ago
  Because it is clearly a derivative work. The very fact these projects strive to be byte perfect shows that they want to be a copy of the original. These people are not creating a new original work which happens to be similar to a game. >Nintendo is litigious But they don't go after every copyright violation. They have a few categories of violations that they focus on. For example go to YouTube and search "pokemon music" and you'll find an endless list of copyright infringement. This doesn't even include the videos people make using pokemon music as background music. >How do you know the major LLMs are not trained on these decomp projects and/or leaks already? It doesn't matter since the risk of it being an issue is low.