> Good luck trying to prove to any judge in the world that you came up with an implementation that happens to be exactly the same as the original game code, down to the same checksum, by pure chance.
Not impossible if you reverse engineer the software and look how the binary code is behaving, emulators does this all the time.
A reimplementation of code that leads to the same binary output isn't covered by the copyright, as long as you don't share copyrighted assets or the actual binaries. What people do with the alternative source code is their business, you can't hold responsible that person for others' action.
We are not talking about a program that "produces the same binary output" when executed. We are talking about a program that _is exactly the same_ as the original one, bit-by-bit.
It is ridiculously impossible to "independently" discover a program that is _exactly the same machine code_ as the original program by just looking at the inputs and outputs of the original program. (Barring trivial programs, of course.)
This is not reverse engineering. This is just dissasembling and decompiling.
Do you think that I can just gzip gplprogram.c and then redistribute gplprogram.c.gz under the "Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License"?
Good luck trying to prove to any judge in the world that you came up with an implementation that happens to be exactly the same as the original game code, down to the same checksum, by pure chance.
What is this, "the ChatGPT defense"? Do you really think that code has intrinsically less right to copyright than art, or what?
>ReactOS and Wine exists and are reimplementations of copyrighted code.
Clean room reimplementations that don't even dare to look at the copyrighted code.