Take-Two filed a lawsuit against the reverse-engineered GTA III and Vice City developers

Sounds like something for EFF to get involved.

Quoting: monyarm

Quoting: 3qET7rL9BdI might be misunderstanding but it doesn't look like a clean room implementation like OpenRA, CorsixTH, OpenMW and GemRB. Instead they've reversed engineered the binaries to get the source code.

Ya, that's not how that works. Literally all open source implementations reverse engineer the original binaries. (even Zdoom, as the support for games like strife and the like had to be reverse engineered). That's how it's done. ScummVM for example recommends that new contributors should use a combination of debuggers and IDAPro (A tool for reverse engineering). And even then, reverse engineering doesn't give you the source code, rather it gives you c-like pseudocode for a given function, pseudocode which lacks names, types, structs, and has plenty of mistakes. It's a long and arduous process to reverse engineer anything.

Huge difference here is that ScummVM only reverses either public domain games or with

Quoting: monyarm

Quoting: 3qET7rL9BdI might be misunderstanding but it doesn't look like a clean room implementation like OpenRA, CorsixTH, OpenMW and GemRB. Instead they've reversed engineered the binaries to get the source code.

Ya, that's not how that works. Literally all open source implementations reverse engineer the original binaries. (even Zdoom, as the support for games like strife and the like had to be reverse engineered). That's how it's done. ScummVM for example recommends that new contributors should use a combination of debuggers and IDAPro (A tool for reverse engineering). And even then, reverse engineering doesn't give you the source code, rather it gives you c-like pseudocode for a given function, pseudocode which lacks names, types, structs, and has plenty of mistakes. It's a long and arduous process to reverse engineer anything.

Big difference there is that both Zdoom and ScummVM does this with the blessing of the copyright holders. Strife was reversed when the original author discovered that all the source code had vanished due to the servers it being held on had been sold.

Quoting: CFWhitman

Quoting: 3qET7rL9BdI might be misunderstanding but it doesn't look like a clean room implementation like OpenRA, CorsixTH, OpenMW and GemRB. Instead they've reversed engineered the binaries to get the source code.

QuoteAs long as it's not linux/cross-platform skeleton/compatibility layer, all of the code on the repo that's not behind a preprocessor condition(like FIX_BUGS) are completely reversed code from original binaries.

Clean room re-implementations are reverse engineered. Of course, a clean room re-implementation is done as follows:

Someone analyzes the original program to figure out how it works/interfaces with other software. They document this as they go along without any references to actual code.

Someone else takes the documentation and writes compatible code without ever directly seeing how the original code works.

The information presented here doesn't actually reveal whether this reverse engineering was done in a "clean room" manner or not.

Another way it so simply observe how the original application/game works and try to recreate it from there. In this particular case it does look like they just went with a decompiler (see my post two posts up).

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:

Quote28. Papenhoff has admitted that the source code developed via the re3 and reVC
projects is not original, but rather is (and was intended to be) a copy of the original. In fact,
Defendants have bragged that their derivative source code was created by working backwards
from Take-Two’s final “machine” code to re-create the human-readable code in which GTA was
programmed:

“GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming
language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in
machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to
C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but
over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this
process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the
decompiler and massage it back into readable C++.” Id.

If this is true and it appears to be so, then this is in fact copyright infringement and not something that any of us really can defend.

I'm not sure if that would actually be copyright infringement, but it certainly doesn't sound like clean room to me either. I think they'll have a hard time defending this one despite all the nonsense claims of T2 and I don't think any legal defenders of open source will want to burn themselves on this one.

Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:

Quote28. Papenhoff has admitted that the source code developed via the re3 and reVC
projects is not original, but rather is (and was intended to be) a copy of the original. In fact,
Defendants have bragged that their derivative source code was created by working backwards
from Take-Two’s final “machine” code to re-create the human-readable code in which GTA was
programmed:

“GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming
language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in
machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to
C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but
over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this
process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the
decompiler and massage it back into readable C++.” Id.

If this is true and it appears to be so, then this is in fact copyright infringement and not something that any of us really can defend.

They recreated the C++ code from the machine code disassembled, then patched it to compile on different platforms... From my understanding that's still one valid way of reverse engineering. The other method of course is to study the data files and create code around interpreting it. Copyright infringement would only be if they literally took the original source code and copied it. That's the part that is copyrighted. Using a disassembler is not illegal in any sense of the word.

Quoting: Ehvis

Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:

Quote28. Papenhoff has admitted that the source code developed via the re3 and reVC
projects is not original, but rather is (and was intended to be) a copy of the original. In fact,
Defendants have bragged that their derivative source code was created by working backwards
from Take-Two’s final “machine” code to re-create the human-readable code in which GTA was
programmed:

“GTA 3 and Vice City were originally written in [programming
language] C++ . . . The compiled executables that are shipped are in
machine code. So the general task is to go from machine code back to
C++. . . . To go back to C++ is by no means a simple 1:1 mapping, but
over the last 10 or so years decompilers have appeared that help with this
process. . . . So what we typically do is work with the output of the
decompiler and massage it back into readable C++.” Id.

If this is true and it appears to be so, then this is in fact copyright infringement and not something that any of us really can defend.

I'm not sure if that would actually be copyright infringement, but it certainly doesn't sound like clean room to me either. I think they'll have a hard time defending this one despite all the nonsense claims of T2 and I don't think any legal defenders of open source will want to burn themselves on this one.

I think what this comes down to is this; (and mind you I skipped most of the thread so it was probably already stated).

1) T2 saw how popular this was.
2) T2 then thought 'but we can't really raise the price on this really old game, and most already own it...'
3) Rockstar, not known for doing remasters of old games... T2 was like 'well why not now? We can resell this!'
4) T2 realized that with an open source engine, and mods, that people could just make their own remastered edition!
5) T2 called lawyers!

Quoting: LachuSentence about lost of market, because game will be available on new platform is stupid. People must still buy an license to play on these new platforms, so Reverse Engineering team made a big gift for Take Two. It must not port game code to the new platform, so save many money. And it will receive profits, because users of these new platforms will buy an game licenses.

QuoteDefendants have sought to exploit a potential market that belongs exclusively to Take-Two

Yep, completely agree. Since you need the original game to use this re-engineered engine, T2 still own the market, still get all profits. Indeed, they do so without any support burden, or risk.

Nearly... oh so nearly picked up GTA-V in the last sale, but glad I didn't now. Last GTA I paid for was 3, funnily enough, back on the PS2, I think, or maybe PS3. I used to work in the same building as the R*N guys too. Of course, this isn't about them as devs, just their knee-jerk publishers.

Quoting: slapinAs I understand new world, corporations split the "markets" between them and became upset someone got to their territory. The claims is so anti-market and anti-capitalistic as whole so I wonder what is going on.

Anti-market perhaps, although markets have always had a lot less of the whole freedom fairy dust than many people are led to believe. Anti-capitalistic, no. We think of markets and capitalism as being near-identical, but they aren't. Capitalism as such has little to do with markets, let alone free ones--monopoly is the objective of every capitalist who gets far enough. The fundamental points that make capitalism a system distinct from other systems is private individuals invest money (capital) to get a profit, employing wage labour to cause the profit to happen. Usually, that involves selling something to someone in something you could call a market, but sometimes it involves outright stealing, sometimes it involves direct selling solely to government as in US defence procurement, sometimes it involves the company store in the company town, where the miners or whoever buy your stuff at your price or they starve. All still capitalism, just not very markety. You can definitely have both markets without capitalism, and capitalism without markets.
(You can also have capitalism without the limited liability corporation)

So what I'm wondering is, what happens if the court finds that
1) The defendants are actually guilty of copyright infringement, but
2) Far from causing "irreparable harm", the reimplementation has actually added to Take-Two's profits and, at least until they started attacking it, enhanced their brand and reputation?

On a side note, does anyone else find it kind of amusing that someone's doing a stickler-for-the-details lawsuit over a game that glorifies and indeed is entirely about violent lawbreaking?