It reminds me of the old New Kind - Oolite - Elite shenanigans from years ago. Somehow Oolite powered through and stuck around, despite using most of the New Kind code originally (they translated the C game logic to Objective C if memory serves me), while New Kind was shut down by Braben for copyright infringement. The New Kind author - Christian Pinder I think was his name - did all the disassembly work originally. I don't think it was ever a big legal challenge there, more like "hey! take that down" and the author complied because he was a nice guy.
That's legal though. Stuff like that is the whole purpose of reverse engineering. You can't copy the code but you can learn how it works so you can do it yourself.
This part is definitely illegal. You can learn how it works but you cannot write the code yourself, you have to write the specs for someone else to do it, who hasn't done the reverse engineering.
I don't know if this would hold up. Prince of Persia IP is far from dead or abandoned. I know it's not exhaustive, but a quick search on IMDB [0] shows a movie in 2010, and a video game as recently as 2008. Just because this particular game is old, doesn't mean the IP/Trademark is dead. Personally, I'd be wary of a legal battle, even though I think the project is pretty interesting.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/find?q=prince+of+persia&ref_=nv_sr_sm
Same with OpenRCT2, which I've heard is also based on the disassembled original, yet people seem to turn a blind eye.
To be honest, the should claim same with PoP and I don't see any solicitor suing them, as it would be too much hustle to prove its a code copy instead of inspired by.
Wow that is really sad, we live in the world where this is even a discussion. Where a love project that will not be commercialized has to think about this bs :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
Apparently that may not be strictly required either, but it gives a good defense. I think I could disassemble a blob to figure out what the possible behaviors of a WinAPI call and then write my own implementation of those things.
Microsoft might bankrupt me before I won a court case, but there is nothing in copyright law as far as I know that says reading a copyright work forever contaminates your mind such that you would be incapable of creating a vaguely similar thing without infringing on it.
> No, but it's possible to write a specification based on the
> disassembly, and then write an implementation based on the specification.
Um, Microsoft bought (what was then called) 86-DOS outright from another company, and ported it to the 8088 CPU used by the original IBM PC.
In fact, ReactOS maintains a policy to prevent proprietary Windows source code (whether leaked or otherwise) from making its way to the ReactOS codebase [0]. When Windows source code leaked, in 2006, ReactOS did a complete codebase audit to ensure that it was not tainted.
"Is ReactOS legal?
Yes. ReactOS is fully legal.
Developers (devs) have not looked at Microsoft Windows™ source code. They have used the public documentation of Microsoft Windows OSes. They have made several tests to understand how Microsoft Windows works. In fact, ReactOS does the same things that Windows does but it does it differently as we don't have the same source code and it is all programmed by different developers. All code in ReactOS is released under the GNU GPL (General Public License). Is ReactOS based on Microsoft Windows™ original source code?
No! ReactOS consists only of clean-room engineered GNU GPL (General Public License) and GPL compatible licensed source code. "
> Clean room design is usually employed as best practice, but not strictly required by law. In NEC Corp. v Intel Corp. (1990), NEC sought declaratory judgment against Intel's charges that NEC's engineers simply copied the microcode of the 8086 processor in their NEC V20 clone. A US judge ruled that while the early, internal revisions of NEC's microcode were indeed a copyright violation, the later one, which actually went into NEC's product, although derived from the former, were sufficiently different from the Intel microcode it could be considered free of copyright violations.[1]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design
2. https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour...
Im definitely not taking shots at ReactOS here, I’m on their side and am fascinated with the project. You’re right I should have been clear that they shut down and has themselves audited instead of risking a court battle but I don’t think the difference matters much, either way they were gonna have a code audit to disprove these allegations. But in regards to them, there’s a lot of wrong information floating around this thread.
> claim was made on 17 January 2006 by developer Hartmut Birr on the ReactOS developers mailing list (ros-dev) that ReactOS contained code derived from disassembling Microsoft Windows.[25] The code that Birr disputed involved the function BadStack in syscall.S,[26] as well as other unspecified items.[27] Comparing this function to disassembled binaries from Windows XP, Birr argued that the BadStack function was simply copy-pasted from Windows XP, given that they were identical. Alex Ionescu, the author of the code, asserted that while the Windows XP binary in question was indeed disassembled and studied, the code was not merely copy-pasted, but reimplemented; the reason why the functions were identical, Ionescu claimed, was because there was only one possible way to implement the function
https://torrentfreak.com/take-two-sues-enthusiasts-behind-gt...