How dare they claim ownership over their property.

If you were talking about a much more recently released game for a current gen console, sure.

Instead, we're talking about a 23 year-old game with numerous predecessors (including one on the way), on a 26 year-old console that hasn't been manufactured in 23 years. The number of people who will go to the effort of playing this pales tremendously in comparison to the rest of Rockstar's active market. There's next to no loss for them here.

And also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42562089

>There's next to no loss for them here.

If anything, going after the people making this would be a greater loss than just letting it exist. Lawyers ain't free.

For most people yes, but Rockstar probably has a salaried legal dept with nothing better to do.

If they had nothing better to do then they’d fire half of them.

You overestimate managerial competence and underestimate misaligned incentives and the ability of people to justify the existence of their jobs by inflating the importance of useless tasks to management.

GTA III was recently remastered so this isn’t strictly true that it has no impact on Rockstar at all.

They brought the impact on themselves by having the remaster be a rebuild of the crappy mobile port. One of the most well known games ever and they treated it like trash.

Digital Foundry did a video back when it released detailing the problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1JJt7xHTlE

>... this isn't strictly true that it has no impact on Rockstar at all.

You're right, but you're right because you're arguing against a statement/point I never made. :)

There's "next to no loss" (I did choose my words carefully...) because people will continue to buy the remastered versions for the consoles they were released for. The only segment of people Rockstar may or may not lose out to are the people who are going to go to the effort to port this to an old, defunct console (one that Rockstar doesn't even see profitability in, since they don't have a version for it), but even then this project requires a legally purchased copy of the game in order to get started.

So now we're into a fun legal/moral area of, "I've purchased this game legally, and I've purchased this console legally, and now I would like to use both together".

Remastered for dreamcast? Right..

They didn't even bother to release san Andreas for the Oculus quest after promoting it. And the remaster was really bad quality.

For Dreamcast?

The Dreamcast port requires a purchased copy of the game for the assets, so if anything I'd expect it to drive more sales.

None of which makes the game not their property. It's their right to prevent people from doing this if they want. I don't disagree that they shouldn't, but ownership doesn't hinge on the recency of the work nor the profitability of it.

They could defend, but there is significant precedent to allow decompilation and reverse engineering and even Nintendo won’t go after projects that decompile code, but don’t include original artwork or audio (hence the need to supply your own copy of the game for this port).

Legal precedent?

Yes, that's why the laws need to be changed to get a fairer ownership system on older titles.

If you don’t defend it. A court could tell you one day it’s not yours to defend.

This gets repeated so frequently online it’s bordering on an (inaccurate) trueism because people vastly overestimate how at-risk entities are for losing their IP. A niche Dreamcast project is not a threat to Rockstar. They’re not going to look up one day at a reality where due to piracy the courts strip one of the largest video game companies in the world of their core IP. Frankly that’s too ridiculous to even consider a possibility.

This is 100% false in terms of copyright. This only applies to trademarks.

There is some loss for them here, Take2 has invested a lot of money into getting a mobile games porting company to port the game to phones and then back to PC as a "re-release". Fans just fixing the original game so it runs on their platform of choice and running that rather than buying the much inferior remasters will hurt their bottom line and make their bad investments even worse.

And, of course, current copyright law doesn't care about good will, it's there to protect the interests of the copyright industry, although the AI industry seems to get away with blatant copyright infringement as long as the copied contents are passed through a model as an intermediary step.

As far as I can tell, Rockstar doesn't really care all that much, it's the suits at the top of the publishing chain that do the legal threats.

I can't stand these one like twitter-style bitchposts. It already starts off obnoxious and sarcastic, and for what, defending Rockstar from the evils of Dreamcast homebrew?

No other person. nor GP said that Rockstar doesn’t have a right to their IP.

What parts of the code did they write?

Of the re3 project? Most of it, since it's decompiled from the GTA 3 executable. And just because compiled code is decompiled doesn't strip it of ownership/copyright.

Should the re-created code be considered as a derivative in copyright terms?

It's kind of a gray area to me as there's so much work on interpretation involved in decompilation. It's very unlikely the decompiled code looks anything like the original source code.

It would be nice to have a leak of the original source code someday to compare but I'm betting it's very different.

On librw, it's a clearer since it's a reimplementation.

I don't think you would be able to convince a court of that because analogies will be made to existing types of works.

Would an adaptation of a book to a movie be any different? One that involves interpretation and thousands of man-hours in set design, actors, special effects, director, etc.

You can additionally argue it's a translation. From machine code to readable source code. Translation are directly covered by copyright law already.

Unlike a book or a movie, the people doing the interpretation do not have access to the source material.

The best analogy for me is a reproduction of an artwork without using it as a base material and that would not be covered by derivative laws I think.

> You can additionally argue it's a translation. From machine code to readable source code. Translation are directly covered by copyright law already.

What's under copyright isn't exactly the binary, it's the translation of the source code to the binary because the source code is what's copyrighted at the end of the day.

Here the line is much muddier since the end result has nothing to do with the copyrighted work.

You don't need the source material to be a derivative though. Music covers are an example of this, and aren't a new concept to copyright. Or a performance of play. The sheet music or source material is the underlaying work, while the painting is considered an expression.

A song recording copyright is separated into copyright of the performance, and copyright of the underlaying work.

> it's the translation of the source code to the binary because the source code is what's copyrighted at the end of the day.

The translation is considered a derivative work of the source code. And derivative works are copyrighted.

Otherwise GPL would have not be able to require source code alongside distribution of binaries.

But the goals of music reproduction is to reproduce the original artwork, in case of a decompilation it's an explicit non-goal as it's impossible anyways.

> The translation is considered a derivative work of the source code. And derivative works are copyrighted.

Decompiled code isn't a translation though but a recreation. It's impossible to use freshly decompiled code for any purpose and there's zero chance any of the original code looks like this.

In music terms it's more akin to an reinterpretation and that wouldn't be a derivative either as far as I know.

The musical equivalent would be to create a music sounding similarly enough to old mario games which would make you remember the games but without being a derivative by itself as it never used any of the originals. And as far as I know, in music you are allowed to do that without being a derivative, otherwise all copycat rock bands of the 80s would be under the same copyright.

> It's impossible to use freshly decompiled code for any purpose

But it is not impossible to use it, otherwise you wouldn't need it. Creating a reinterpretation of software without looking at the decompiled code is fine, that's what OpenMW or Wine do.

> The musical equivalent would be to create a music sounding similarly

That's a parody or homage though. And still not the same, I'd argue cover songs are reinterpretations. Say I do a Jazz cover of a theme from Mario.

> But the goals of music reproduction is to reproduce the original artwork, in case of a decompilation it's an explicit non-goal as it's impossible anyways.

If I "decompile" a movie into a script, that won't perfectly match the original script. I'd have to add my own stage directions, set descriptions, etc. And of course the film never 100% matches the original script. Is that script now somehow not Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?

Individual ideas are fine, but good luck convincing a jury that your script about a boy in wizard school stealing an egg from a dragon as the first task of cross-school tournament wasn't lifted from a popular movie. In a similar vein, code that compiles to function exactly the same as a large complicated software seems suspect.

> But it is not impossible to use it, otherwise you wouldn't need it. Creating a reinterpretation of software without looking at the decompiled code is fine, that's what OpenMW or Wine do.

Sure that's also possible, that's also what librw (Renderware engine) has done here for GTA3 and Vice city, only the game code itself was decompiled, not the game engine.

But then again, it's not because you use the binary that it makes it a derivative of the original source code. The conversion of source code to binary loses tons of information, it's a destructive process.

> If I "decompile" a movie into a script, that won't perfectly match the original script. I'd have to add my own stage directions, set descriptions, etc. And of course the film never 100% matches the original script. Is that script now somehow not Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?

I'd say no, that's a different movie script.

It's a 25 year old game. It belongs to everyone now. Fuck perpetual copyright and anybody who supports it.

Preserving art? Fuck that. Embrace private ownership!

Re3 is online again, however, in some form at least:

https://github.com/halpz/re3/

Not sure why would they do that as the re3 engine require a copy of the game to run.

We're living in a world of frivolous take-down demands, where the law says shoot first, ask questions later, and all the power is concentrated with the copyright mafia. (How meta.)

Retro games are highly lucrative. They don't want any competition to remasters and rereleases, which require a new purchase. Nintendo has been doing this "release the same game every 5-10 years" bs since the Wii (ironically often using ROMs found on the internet).

RE3 was a reverse engineered product. It used the original source and logic to derive an ABI compatible implementation. This has always been a grey area-outright illegal activity. It's the entire reason Compaq clean room engineered (or, at the very least, claimed to) their BIOS all the way back in 1982.

Every time I hear people complain about this, I just have to roll my eyes. Go do a clean room implementation like OpenRA and you're legally pretty safe. Use their IP and you're just asking for them to easily shut you down once you catch enough attention.

People are complaining about it because they think it's unfair and it's abuse of IP law. People's interests aren't defined by court decisions.

Your example is akin to there being a very clear "No Jaywalking sign", jaywalking anyways because you see no traffic/others doing it, having a cop hit you with a ticket, and then complaining that the cop is abusing his power. No, you just got caught; and are whining.

Society has decided they don't want people doing that. If you don't like it, convince enough of your peers to change it; or accept that the society you're in doesn't agree with you. Welcome to democracy.

Exactly, jaywalking is also a made up crime that benefits some (car users) at the expense of everyone else. Just like copyright it is a bad deal for society and should be ignored whenever possible. Reclaim pedestrian spaces AND reclaim your culture!