Take-Two Sues Enthusiasts Behind GTA Fan Projects Re3 and ReVC

I don't do much IP personally, but I'm familiar enough to have seen that a lot of people, even judges, don't always draw those technical clear lines between different types of IP. So, going both ways -- it's not unthinkable that someone would try to

1) apply this reasoning but with copyright and/or

2) claim (if flimisily) that this is trademark infringement, despite it not exactly fitting with how the law is supposed to work.

The question here is whether you are allowed to publish the results of your reverse engineering and decompilation efforts on GitHub. In this case, the answer seems like a very clear and obvious "no".

1. It's a derivative work of the original.

2. It's the entire executable, not just a portion.

3. It's not transformative.

4. The original work is creative.

5. It competes with demand for the original work (remasters).

With so many different factors stacked against it, I just don't see any kind of plausible defense here.

> Transcribing a play, you would get back an almost exact copy of the source material, whereas decompiling is more akin to taking a car and measuring all the bits of it.

Another red herring here... it is irrelevant how superficially close this is to the original source code.

When you compile a program, the result is not a copy of the original source code either. However, the compiled version of a program retains the copyright of the original source code. Likewise, a decompiled program would retain the copyright.

> The questions is wether there are enough legal loopholes to squash these generally allowed uses...

"Legal loopholes" kind of presumes that this sort of effort is permitted by default, but might be illegal through some kind of technicality. These people are distributing the results of IDA Pro / Ghidra decompilation efforts of an entire executable program on GitHub. Seems like very crystal-clear case of copyright infringement.

Again, to clarify things because people are hung up on this point--it is not about whether reverse engineering is legal. It is about whether you are permitted to distribute the results of reverse engineering. Kind of like asking whether it's legal to rip a CD... yes, ripping a CD is legal. Posting a ripped CD online is not.

> Another red herring here... it is irrelevant how superficially close this is to the original source code.

It wasn't until Apple vs. Franklin that object code became copyrightable, prior to that the USPTO held the analogy of "design drawings vs. actual bridge" as the relation of "source vs. object code", and as far as I am aware that case still left some questions open.

There's also the first sale doctrine. So, once I buy a (mechanical, haha) car, I can modify it, take measurements of it, in fact describe and publish every bit of information I can think up of, right, because once it was given to me, I can do with it as I please, unimpeded by the manufacturer. This is, of course, where things get murky.

Now, a binary has elements of literal nature that copyright protects, but a decompilation results in a completely different information stream, so that seems like a non issue. Thus, we are left with the non-literal copyrightable elements of structure, sequence, organization. Copyright protects expression, but not ideas. So, the binary code is an expression of the author's ideas, and thus it seems sensible that the decompiled version is, too, BUT: only creative expression, not things that are necessary and utilitarian to perform a given function, and this is where it get's less well-defined. So if there are decompiled portions, that might not be enough for a copyright claim, provided they are utilitarian in nature. Of course, just decompiling the whole thing and publishing that looks very much like infringemen, indeed.

I do think this nicely embodies the difficulty of dealing with IP vs. actual, tangible things, though. With the car or bridge analogs, copyright would not prevent anyone from replicating them, but it would be patents and trademarks that put restrictions on how and what can be reproduced, instead of the much stronger restrictions of copyright on software.

I'd personally much more comfortably equate binary code with mechanical elements than works of creative authorship (though much of my livelyhood relies on the latter, in lieu of other mechanisms), but this view isn't universally shared, and possibly not even universally applicable.

It's as if person 1 built a machine (source+compiler) that generates paintings (binary) to sell, and then person 2 saw the painting and built an entirely different machine that can do the same thing. Person 1 can't tell person 2 what to do with their machine.

I make a board game and give away instructions on how to play the game. The game instructions include going out and buying Lego pieces to assemble the boardgame. Lego now wants to make boardgames and sues me. Is what I'm doing illegal?