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: F.UltraQuoting: 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".
Well, perhaps some hard-core modders will get this working on Swtich, but it's not quite there yet. I agree that this is probably the mindset of the executives at T2 making this decision.
I guess it's like DRM, a little. The executives/publisher thinks they're protecting sales, but the reality is that I'm not buying their game as a result of their actions. Hopefully I'm not alone, but sadly enough people do buy/play Denuvo-encumbered and similarly restricted DRM titles that the executives/publishers don't get the message.
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.
Goddamit, yeah. Between Activision (and Blizzard especially), Zenimax, Bethesda, Ubisoft and EA, it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Pretty depressing.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: 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)
You (same as politicians) mixing capitalism - private ownership, free market with corporativism - that think you talk about. Its distict thing.
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.
Since running the software requires the original data files, it is easily defended as a case of fair use. If it turns out not to be so in the courts, it'd be time to ask some pointed questions as to why copyright law is so broken that it isn't.
TheRiddick Sep 4, 2021
Not saying they don't make great games; its just hard to enjoy the fruit when its handed to you by the devil himself... :-)
Quoting: F.UltraClaim 28 is quite damaging to the reverse-engineering team:This shows that plaintif and you did not understand what reverse engineers say:
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.
1. GTA code was written in C++
2. They managed to create their own code in C++ working in the same way as GTA code.
If you read they took original GTA code, you need to check your sight.
Quoting: slapinThey managed to create their own code in C++ working in the same way as GTA code.
This can be argued, since they did decompile it and use the decompiled code with tools to get code that behaves like the original. Ofc there is more involved than just that, but it's basically using the original code, decompiling it and using tools to get manageable C++ code and work from there - and that can certainly be argued as copyright infringement.
Personally, if they never framed it the way of decompiled code but a green field approach, they'd probably have a better ground at court.
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