51–60 of 93 posts
Is anyone here a lawyer who can explain why it's worth taking such a big publicity hit over this by Take-Two? Like it is clear these guys are not taking away any business from them, nor are they really losing any money. Is there some sort of IP reason, like they need to defend the IP lest it be marked as being abandoned? Or is there some other legit reason beyond spite that they are taking this on? I dont see Take-Tw…
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> the composer would have legal grounds to sue and win I wonder was that tested in a court? In a case where the person who transcribed the song has not profited in any way from that, neither selling the transcription, not selling ads on the web?
> I wonder was that tested in a court? Yes, over and over again I'm sure. I remember hearing about some specific cases involving Broadway composers but I can't remember the details. This is not some kind of weird edge case, it's an entire industry. You have people who write music, people who perform music, people who transcribe records, and then companies which sell books of transcriptions / arrangements. This is wha…
Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder.
Giving transcriptions for free and not even making money with advertisements on the web is not, and I would be interested to see a court case against a person doing that. Even if that’s a copyright violation that’s still reasonable. The copyright owner can assume that at least some of the people who have download free transcriptions would otherwise go to a music store and pay them for the license. The transcriber has caused monetary losses to copyright holder.
But with GTA3 it’s different. People like me who built and run the game from that github repository still need to own the original games. Therefore, people who developed that code have not caused any monetary losses to the developer selling original games.
Is anyone here a lawyer who can explain why it's worth taking such a big publicity hit over this by Take-Two? Like it is clear these guys are not taking away any business from them, nor are they really losing any money. Is there some sort of IP reason, like they need to defend the IP lest it be marked as being abandoned? Or is there some other legit reason beyond spite that they are taking this on? I dont see Take-Tw…
Legal department / managers etc. needed something to do.
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> I wonder was that tested in a court? Yes, over and over again I'm sure. I remember hearing about some specific cases involving Broadway composers but I can't remember the details. This is not some kind of weird edge case, it's an entire industry. You have people who write music, people who perform music, people who transcribe records, and then companies which sell books of transcriptions / arrangements. This is wha…
On the high level, copyright is a mechanism allowing to make profits from intellectual property. Take Two should demonstrate in the court how the defendants interfered with their ability to extract profit. I don’t think they can do that. Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder. Giving transcriptions for free and not e…
Maybe the law should work that way, but it definitely doesn't work that way.
> Selling transcriptions = making profit from copyrighted work. Obviously illegal unless the seller has an agreement with the copyright holder.
Fair use has four factors, and whether the infringing party is making profit is only one of the four factors.
You can also get sued for photocopying sheet music you legally purchased, when you're not making any money from the copies or from the performances. It has happened because selling sheet music is the primary way some composers make money in the first place, and so much of the case law around music dates back to an era where that was just how music was published.
> But with GTA3 it’s different. People like me who built and run the game from that github repository still need to own the original games. Therefore, people who developed that code have not caused any monetary losses to the developer selling original games.
These kinds of arguments don't have any legal basis. You can argue for changes in copyright law all you like. Your original comment was about the legality, and that's what I'm responding to.
Man, regardless of who is in the right legally, I wish these big corporations had a better sense of humor and would understand and appreciate that the people who go to these lengths to understand and recreate the original code aren't their enemies, but their biggest fans.
It's something I really appreciate about Sega's handling of Sonic IP: as long as you aren't trying to make money you can pretty much get away with anything. I think Sonic's continued popularity is in no small part due to this policy.
I disagree. Sega can be an awful-bully when it comes to their IP. It wasn't until the SteamDB issue went viral that they backed-down [1] and the Streets of Rage remake. [2]
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/03/sega-forces-mistaken-...
[2] https://www.destructoid.com/sega-has-streets-of-rage-remake-...
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It's not a decompiled copy. A decompiled copy is not useful for anything, as it would have to be recompiled. State of the art decompiles produce incomprehensible garbage, rarely even possible to compile. In such projects, what's distributed is a recreation of the compiled form of the original software, bearing little resemblance to what the original creators worked on. In terms of work and creativity involved, it's m…
It's decompiled and cleaned up. I have personally gone through the commit history of this project and read the source code. It is absolutely clear that this is based on the output of decompilers like IDA Pro and Ghidra. You can see how variables are not defined as ordinary variables, but as hard-coded addresses which are then cast to pointers of the appropriate type. The code is littered with unnecessary casts that a…
Do you have a link? I have downloaded all 3 branches (master, miami and lcs), searched for these constants and got nothing.
The code you have copy-pasted crashes on Windows with 100% guarantee. You see, lower 2GB (or optionally 1GB with the /3GB kernel switch) of address space is reserved for the OS kernel.
I played a pirate copy of VC when I was a poor student and loved the game. Hearing of ReVC just now made me consider buying it, a 20 year old game. Take-Twos belligerent approach just killed that consideration. They have fans both hardcore enough to restore the game and loving enough to provide the restored version to others, and they choose to slap them with a lawsuit over a 20 year old game? We the people don’t hav…
I suspect that they plan to rerelease or remaster the game, and having a fan project being of higher quality than their own product would undercut their sales expectations.
Seeing how the recent GTA:SA releases perform, that's quite easy to achieve. Makes me think there should be some legal contemplation that if you don't actively distribute or charge for this stuff you get to do it anyhow.
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They make money from having lots of customers, not from having a few obsessed fans. I’ve heard this argument before but the kind of people who are obsessed enough to reverse-engineer old games don’t necessarily even play new games. They’re often fans of the old games and don’t play new games, or they’re people who are interested in reverse engineering. You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engine…
Here’s another data point since it’s not always as simple as “remastering”. Nintendo released Super Mario 3D All Stars for a limited purchase window between Sept 2020 and March 2021. Super Mario 64 was included in its original 1996 glory, included a low frame rate, 4:3 aspect ratio, low res textures (iirc they were slightly improved). In fact, Nintendo’s bundle was literally a N64 emulator running on the switch. At t…
In fact, I'd guess it's much more likely that the existence of such fan projects increases sales. Because it keep a conversation going about the IP. We can certainly say, an old IP that is not being talked about is essentially not selling.
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My understanding is that the code is directly reverse engineered/decompiled from the original code, so while it doesn't contain game assets, it's based on (compiled) code copyrighted by Take-Two.
It'd be interesting to see if this actually goes to court, because decompiled code is technically new code, not the original. Decompilers can't retrieve the original code written by Rockstar devs, but it can write new code that behaves like it. Is that a derivative work? If a person were to do that by hand, I think most people would say it's fair use.
https://chart.copyrightdata.com/Colorization.html https://www.traverselegal.com/blog/can-derivative-works-be-c...
I think most groups that do this sort of thing understand that. Just depends on the company you are doing it to and how understanding they are of it and how much are they willing to spend to go after it. If you are spending thousands to go after something that may make you 200 bucks off of over the next 20 years you are just spending money on something that is basically worthless to the company. In this case they are probably burning a lot of good will. The mod community for those games is huge and in many ways keep those games interesting for people.
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They make money from having lots of customers, not from having a few obsessed fans. I’ve heard this argument before but the kind of people who are obsessed enough to reverse-engineer old games don’t necessarily even play new games. They’re often fans of the old games and don’t play new games, or they’re people who are interested in reverse engineering. You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engine…
That said, using any of these mods requires a valid GTA V license, so OP is right, by killing this project, they are killing their own sales.