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.