Identical fork is restored after DMCA counterclaim. //

adespoton Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y

In general, reverse-engineering source code from a compiled binary is less straightforwardly illegal than simply cracking a game's DRM for piracy purposes, for instance. As the EFF explains, US case law includes certain fair use exceptions that can allow for this kind of decompilation work for research or interoperability purposes.

In the case of Grand Theft Auto, though, the game's End User License Agreement specifically asks players to agree not to "reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, prepare derivative works based on or otherwise modify the Software, in whole or in part." Back in 2005, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a similar anti-reverse-engineering EULA to take down BnetD, a reverse-engineered version of Blizzard's Battle.net that allowed the service to be emulated on private servers.

That's not quite how US Copyright works. If something's fair use, it doesn't matter what the EULA says, as Fair Use means copyright doesn't hold sway, which means any agreements based on copyright claims are meaningless.

The big difference here is that bnetd was used to create competition for the official battle.net server, so it didn't pass the Fair Use test. If it were released on Github today, there'd be no issue, as battle.net is no longer hosted by its creator, so there IS a fair use claim in play today.

And before people argue that copyright doesn't care about intent and competition... copyright of course does not; but Fair Use, which precludes copyright, does.

So while Take Two could argue that this game engine release that's binary compatible with their assets competes with current offerings of other games, Fair Use argues that Take Two no longer supports their game on modern hardware, so this third party code steps into that gap to enable assets to be used in the way intended at time of original purchase.

So at the end of the day, this isn't really any different than Right to Repair regarding John Deere and Apple: it's repairing an existing (and purchased) product so it can still be used. Take Two can't (successfully) argue that since they make a new tractor they want people to buy, they can stop people from upgrading the last tractor they sold them.

According to the Washington Post, attorneys sent letters to the Department of Justice and the Delaware attorney general requesting investigations of several people who either accessed or disseminated information from the laptop that he allegedly dropped off at the computer repair shop in Delaware. //

This is all sort of quietly hilarious because at this point they’re more than a little late. You can’t lock the door after the horse has bolted out of the barn and that happened a long time ago. The laptop material is everywhere.

But on top of that, hasn’t the left been telling us this was Russian disinformation for two years? //

What about those 51 former intelligence community officials who told us they thought was Russian disinformation?

But let’s not forget Joe Biden himself pushing that. //

So now that the lawyers are claiming that somehow people accessed and disseminate private information, it sounds like they’re acknowledging it’s real and that’s pretty funny after all the prior comments.

Mainstream society has been doing its absolute best to eliminate the common garden-variety boy from society. The rambunctious, exploratory, adventurous, and action-centric boy was the seed that grew into the masculine man that would drive civilization, right societal wrongs, and lead people with confidence into a better future.

Raising a boy isn’t necessarily easy. They’re no strangers to danger and find ways to hurt themselves unnecessarily, sometimes for the fun of it. They also love mischief, and will naturally gravitate toward it. Whether the mischief they get up to is good-natured or malicious is based on how well they were raised, but according to our now gyno-centric society, there is no such thing as good boyhood mischief.

Boys have been treated as defective girls for decades now. The goal was to make the boy extinct and turn him into something a bit more pliable and obedient. Schools would see to it that boys were punished for doing things normal boys would do, such as fighting imaginary bad guys on the playground by throwing imaginary grenades at them.

Sure enough, the boy has been lessened, especially with a severe lack of masculine figures to look up to thanks to our entertainment industry becoming so feminized. //

We need to bring back boys. They’re clearly good for society, and not just in the future.