Well this is a shame but in many ways to be expected. Take-Two Interactive Software, the parent company of Rockstar Games, has filed a lawsuit against the developers of the reverse-engineered GTA III and Vice City code.
This is a bit of an ongoing saga, as Take-Two first got the GitHub repositories taken down, which were later restored when the developer of a fork submitted a counter-notice which wasn't argued so they all went back up. The repositories are still live on GitHub right now. The notice mentions this with Take-Two saying the counter notices were "were made in bad faith, and knowingly and deliberately misrepresented to GitHub the contents".
Plenty more is argued as well of course. In the notice it complains how the code now runs on platforms it was never released for where the "Defendants have sought to exploit a potential market that belongs exclusively to Take-Two", it argues against new cheats enabled in the source code which "are strictly prohibited under Take-Two’s terms of service". It goes further, complaining about modding which Take-Two say "encouraging users to further infringe the original Games and to violate their agreements with Take-Two that prohibit such activities".
As a result of the code being public, Take-Two are claiming it the "Defendants have caused and continue to cause irreparable harm".
Take-Two are looking to get damages paid which as of yet "are not currently ascertainable", so they want it to be worked out. On top of that they want the "maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each work infringed" and they also want their "attorneys’ fees and full costs" paid as well.
The point about cheats is a funny one. Single-player games from the early 2000s have cheats added in? Extra modding too? Oh no, how completely terrible for people to further enjoy them.
Why was this lawsuit coming to be expected? Well, reverse-engineered code tends to be a grey area with it often being against the law, and code from leaks is a big no for all sorts of obvious legal reasons. That said, the source code did require people to actually buy the games for the data, so Take-Two would have still be getting revenue thanks to it.
Sadly though, like most major publishers, they shy away from any sort of open source. In this case, Take-Two and Rockstar are reportedly doing a big GTA Remastered Trilogy so moving to fully protect their code was obvious.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: mrdeathjrNo more money for take two sound nice now
The only thing is you know nobodys going to do that gta 6 is going to be the best selling game when it comes out i personnally havent liked a gta game since vice city
Quoting: Purple Library GuyOn 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?
Indeed! For a moment I totally forgot what "Grand Theft A." was about ... totally amusing indeed!
Kimyrielle Sep 3, 2021
That being said, while I am against abolishing copyright, it needs to be scaled back to sane levels. Copyright on software needs to expire after 20 years at latest. Not getting extended on Disney's request for all eternity every time Mickey Mouse is set to become public domain.
QuotePlenty more is argued as well of course. In the notice it complains how the code now runs on platforms it was never released for where the "Defendants have sought to exploit a potential market that belongs exclusively to Take-Two", it argues against new cheats enabled in the source code which "are strictly prohibited under Take-Two’s terms of service". It goes further, complaining about modding which Take-Two say "encouraging users to further infringe the original Games and to violate their agreements with Take-Two that prohibit such activities".
Runs on platforms it was never released for: that's great, someone improved the original. You didn't release and you think you can complain, because of the potential market that you want to reserve. Because people that already bought (you need original assets) need to buy again for a different platform, which is already bad.
Making mods illegal? That's both stupid and evil. Cheats on single-player also are none of your business, suing people for that is utterly stupid.
They probably are legally correct... because those laws are utter bullshit.
Quoting: tonRI'm very sorry to Electronic Arts (EA) for losing "the worst game publisher in the world of the year" title. This year "competition" is so damn tough.
It's actually bit funny as Electronic Arts has done something that's quite opposite what Take-Two is doing right now. The source code of Command & Conquer: Remastered Collections is available in Github with a GPLv3 license (though they have supplementary conditions to the license, which GPLv3 actually allows for certain things). In that particular case Electronic Arts actually collaborated with the modding community. I have probably forgotten some of the details, but Noclip has done documentary with some additional details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MUDQYWk6qY
So releasing remastered version can be handled differently.
Quoting: scaineQuoting: 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.
Not really, with a free implementation of GTA3 you can buy say the cheap pc version to get the assets and then use this free port to have the game on the Switch, meanwhile T2 want you to pay a premium to be able to play GTA3 on the Switch so the free version have "taken that market away from T2".
Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team: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.
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.
Using a disassembler just to look at the code is not illegal no, but if the binary machine code is copyrighted to T2 then the disassembled C++ code is also copyrighted to T2 since its derived from the copyrighted binary. There is precedence here in Sega vs Accolade where the appeals court decided that disassembled code is "fruit of the poisonous tree".
However they also decided that it fell under the fair use doctrine since "disassembly is required for humans to understand object code", but as I see it this does not apply here since the disassembled code was not used to understand how the game engine worked, it was used 1:1 to create the base source code of the project.
Arguing that this is legal would IMHO break the copyright protection that we have on GPL:ed code, in that companies can take our code as base and then do "changes" to it and now claim their own copyright on it and make it proprietary.
Last edited by F.Ultra on 3 September 2021 at 8:13 pm UTC
IP Law is currently nothing more than a giant hammer used by corporate legal to beat the little people over the head with and it's their turn to be on the receiving end.
I disagree though that it's a market belonging to T2, since it's a market they never catered to and a market by definitoon does not belong to anyone, and I disagree that it caused T2 any harm financially, since you require the base game, and game enhancements and mods hardly do them harm if you are required to buy the original copy from T2, rather the opposite would be the case.
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