At best it would be a wash, there is a decent chance the damages for the countersuit would lead to a net loss.
This is basically how Rockstar used it - to make the game work on computers without CDs. So the actual rights holder has recognised that this tool or one like it is legitimately required for interoperability, between the game as a piece of technology and a modern computer. They won't work together otherwise.
Maybe I am being too tricky but that's how I see it. And if that makes it a legitimate work then it's funny to think about the consequences.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/10/28/2021-23...
Geeks often think that the law is some sort of blockchain-esque thing that is absolute, context-free and machine-interpretable.
In reality, many laws require 'guilty intent' (mens rea). This is why we have 'judges', who perform 'judgement'.
So the same tool called 'no-cd', marketed as a backup tool may be judged 'OK', where 'WaR3z HaCk.exe' published by a group of known software pirates will be judged 'anti circumvention'
A Harry Potter spin-off about Hermione (I don't know anything about HP, sorry in advanced) is a derivative of the original Harry Potter work. As I'm sure you are well aware, you cannot sell copies of your Hermione spin-off, because that'd be copyright infringement, because it is a derivative work.
Very true.
> You can't make a derivative work without a license. T
You can, but it is a copyright violation to do so unless an exception (like Fair Use) applies.
A derivative work is also a work eligible for copyright in its own right, and as such is copyright by the creator by operation of law when fixed in a tangible form, whether or not it also violates someone else’s copyright.
> It derivates
“derives”
> from the copyrighted work and is therefore within the domain of the copyright and under the control of the copyright's owner.
No, producing it is within the legally exclusive rights of the copyright holder subject to the limitations on those rights, but once created the copyright in the derivative is not under the control of the copyright holder of the original (though transferring or licensing back may be part of the resolution of copyright violation lawsuit over its creation.)
See 17 U.S.C. §103(a), which says that derivative works can be copyrighted, but that does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
(not a lawyer but I did audit this class at a law school)
This is actually an unanswered/unproven question that comes up quite a bit in automotive tuning, where individuals and tuning companies modify OEM calibrations and create application software patches which, while they are unique and perform stand-alone functions, run on top of OEM ECU software.
GCC made an enhancement board for Missile Command and later for Pac Man ("Crazy Otto", which became "Ms. Pac Man"). Rather than employing simple "ROM hacks" as other enhancement board manufacturers did, GCC specifically built their enhancement hardware not to contain any code copied from the original game ROM. Their hardware patched the existing ROM only by overlaying their code onto the original ROMs, not by copying any of the original code[1].
There's some neat detail in the background slides here[2]. I'd love to hear that talk but I'm not immediately a recording of it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Computer_Corporation
[1] https://web.stanford.edu/class/sts145/Notes/3_game_business/...
Yes, just as annotations are recognised as being a derivative work even without the original.
> Is the unique, creative work of writing "perform XYZ instruction at XYZ address," in lieu of the original executable, still derivative?
If you can convince a judge that, on the balance of probabilities, you were divinely inspired to write it with no connection to the original executable, then it's not derivative. But good luck with that.
But you can distribute it for free, as fanfiction.
Also, a no-CD crack does not contain any of the original work. It's akin to a program that you can use to modify, say, your legally-purchased Harry Potter ebook in order to change all instances of "wand" to "wang"
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gqjz/anne-rice-really-hate...
Not legally.
> Also, a no-CD crack does not contain any of the original work. It's akin to a program that you can use to modify, say, your legally-purchased Harry Potter ebook in order to change all instances of "wand" to "wang"
Doesn't matter, it's still a derivative work, just as a translation or annotation that doesn't contain any of the original text is a derivative work.
A maybe more clear example is music. Songwriting is covered by copywrite. Singing is also covered by copywrite. If A writes a song and B sings the song without A:s premission it can be copyright infringment. However, A can not take a recording of B:s song and copy and sell it without B:s consent because B has the copyright to the performance (even if the performance was a copywright infringment).
So I can't write a story with HP characters, but I can't be copyright struck for writing that there is a book called Harry Potter that has these characteristics.
(The above is in the USA, other countries have different policies and rights.)
https://www.mugglenet.com/site/publications/
You can also find unofficial and unauthorized books in other settings, such as Minecraft, but you can argue that it's explicitly permitted as seen here: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/commercial-use-guide... - but you can ignore those in the USA in many cases - here's one already: https://www.amazon.com/Minecraft-Monarchies-UnOfficial-Story...
>There are at least four books so far in the "unofficial" series, and if you believe that the companies involved wouldn't copyright strike it if they could, that's protected by the first amendment.
You have no idea what you are talking about. The first amendment isn't a defense to copyright infringement. transformative fair use with a de minimis copying is.
That was my scene back in the day when there was less risk of the Feds kicking in the door. At least back then most of us saw it as a learning experience.
Why did you do this? Fame? Money? Challenge?
I didn't know enough to so it myself and no one would teach me.
Fame: Non-existent, since you don't tell people.
Money: Non-existent, you don't get paid.
In retrospect, I think a major drivers for teenagers for a lot of activities is a sense of identity. You feel like one of the role models in [name your favorite hacker movie]. It's the same reason why punks wore spikes and mohawks, goths wore black, and people might pick a genre of music (even if privately). I'd guess a lot of more negative things, like vandalism, are similar too.
You become part of a community too.
And ultimately, you contribute to it. As much as it might be illegal, cracking software helps other kids who can't afford that software. Few real engineers will use a hacked copy of AutoCAD, and literally everyone I know began to pay for music once they could afford it. On the other end of the bell curve are kids who can't afford those. Providing them with access is a community service. And it's going up against The Man. It's illegal, but by the code of ethics we followed at the time, it was very ethical.
I did it because it was interesting, I wanted to prove DRM is a flawed concept and broken construct, and because the community which I built (as a result) was really great and a home to me when I didn't ever experience one.
It was never about money or fame, it was about providing something to people that had a value. People said the "thing" I provided was better than the "real thing", and that gave me a sense of pride: I'd never get hired by the company that made "real thing" to make their "thing" better because I didn't have the credentials on paper.
But at least my "thing" was better.
At least in the 90s there were lots of tutorials to learn how to crack/reverse engineer, from +orc’s documentation to fravia ´s fortress of reverse engineering - I’d expect similar tutorials to still be around.
Reverse engineering also happens to be a very useful skill as a regular software engineer ( debugging compiler bugs, figuring out why software X is behaving strangely and what it is doing etc ).
All that reverse engineering experience gave me a particularly useful talent as a developer: an uncanny ability to sit down and grok other people’s code almost like magic.
Solid experience with reverse engineering really is a good skill to have.
On the other hand, probably 15-20 years after I had last used a crack for a game I had to implement some basic protection like this into a piece of software (more like: make sure the customer will not run this demo version forever) and it was fun to discuss in the team what we all remembered from back then and which measures were adequate to implement.