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Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

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Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#91

Post by ThatPlayer »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #85
ThatPlayer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the original authors did not write the decompiled source This isn't anything new or unique to programming. In the same way if I were to transcribe a movie (let's say it's a silent movie) to a script, it would still be that movie. Or if I were to translate a book into Klingon . Or even do a cover song of "Beat It" entirely with throat singing. Copyright would still apply.

> Or even do a cover song of "Beat It" entirely with throat singing. Copyright would still apply. bad example, in this specific case copyright would actually not apply

Could you explain why not? That's exactly the kind of thing a mechanical license would give: the right to cover a song. The difference with music is by law they have to let you obain a compulsory mechanical license.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#92

Post by matheusmoreira »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #75
arghwhat wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that reverse engineering does not have to be clean room, poking at hardware without ever seeing any software. In many places, poking at the proprietary software, decompiling it, tracing it, and so forth is fine despite what unenforcable EULA's might suggest. What is not okay is taking the binaries or decompiled source verbatim and re-distributing it. Note that e.g. copyright does not apply to decompiled source c…

> the original authors did not write the decompiled source This isn't anything new or unique to programming. In the same way if I were to transcribe a movie (let's say it's a silent movie) to a script, it would still be that movie. Or if I were to translate a book into Klingon . Or even do a cover song of "Beat It" entirely with throat singing. Copyright would still apply.

The method of operation is not protected by copyright. You can write a program that works just like the proprietary software.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#93

Post by DidYaWipe »

firesteelrain wrote: post #86
DidYaWipe wrote: post #76

What is "RTEMS?"

It’s a real time operating system for for serious embedded systems where standards compliance and predictability are critical — think satellites or military drones. It compares to VxWorks if you are familiar with it

Thanks!

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#94

Post by matheusmoreira »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #91
thescriptkiddie wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or even do a cover song of "Beat It" entirely with throat singing. Copyright would still apply. bad example, in this specific case copyright would actually not apply

Could you explain why not? That's exactly the kind of thing a mechanical license would give: the right to cover a song. The difference with music is by law they have to let you obain a compulsory mechanical license.

Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp.

> The object code of a program may be copyrighted as expression, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), but it also contains ideas and performs functions that are not entitled to copyright protection. See 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).

> Object code cannot, however, be read by humans.

> The unprotected ideas and functions of the code therefore are frequently undiscoverable in the absence of investigation and translation that may require copying the copyrighted material.

> We conclude that, under the facts of this case and our precedent, Connectix's intermediate copying and use of Sony's copyrighted BIOS was a fair use for the purpose of gaining access to the unprotected elements of Sony's software.

Not only are the methods of operation which underlie the code completely unprotected by copyright, the copying of and the application of tools to the code for the purpose of exercising your right to discover those unprotected elements is fair use.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#95

Post by ThatPlayer »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #94
ThatPlayer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain why not? That's exactly the kind of thing a mechanical license would give: the right to cover a song. The difference with music is by law they have to let you obain a compulsory mechanical license.

Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp. > The object code of a program may be copyrighted as expression, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), but it also contains ideas and performs functions that are not entitled to copyright protection. See 17 U.S.C. § 102(b). > Object code cannot, however, be read by humans. > The unprotected ideas and functions of the code therefore are frequently undiscoverable in the absence of investiga…

That doesn't cover mainstream distribution. Fair use is only "intermediate copying" for translation. That doesn't mean copyright doesn't apply. Even the part you quoted still refers to it as "copyrighted material" and "copyrighted BIOS".

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#97

Post by ForgotMyUUID »

mod50ack wrote: post #55
ForgotMyUUID wrote: post #52

[flagged]

The Homebrew channel was never on the Wii Shop Channel. It was only installable by using a hack.

Anyway, thanks to teamtwizzers , waininkoko and others for encouraging my teenage curiosity with reinstalling cIOSes, flipped screen, ported doom, internet radio, gmap client and many more. It all added a bit of charm for Wii

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#98

Post by giovannibajo1 »

eqvinox wrote: post #63
ndiddy wrote: post #60

I'm not a lawyer, but publicly announcing that you found out that you were using a library largely consisting of decompiled Nintendo SDK code, then continued to use it and distribute binaries with the library compiled into them seems inadvisable to me. On the other hand, the Wii's no longer commercially relevant so I doubt Nintendo will do anything about it either to him or to the DevKitPro project. Maybe that's why…

Copyright laws (in sane countries) have (varying amounts of) exceptions for reverse engineering pieces that are required for compatibility/interoperability. Whether this applies to the Nintendo SDK… no clue, ask your lawyer ;). (i.e.: was there an alternative option to using RE'd pieces of the Nintendo SDK?) It makes sense from a perspective/perception of: with the Nintendo SDK, [if] there wasn't really a choice or a…

Of course there was. You can clean-room reverse-engineer the hardware. This is what is done daily by Libdragon maintainers for supplying an open source SDK for Nintendo 64 with zero proprietary code in it.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#99

Post by matheusmoreira »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #95
matheusmoreira wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony Computer Entertainment v. Connectix Corp. > The object code of a program may be copyrighted as expression, 17 U.S.C. § 102(a), but it also contains ideas and performs functions that are not entitled to copyright protection. See 17 U.S.C. § 102(b). > Object code cannot, however, be read by humans. > The unprotected ideas and functions of the code therefore are frequently undiscoverable in the absence of investiga…

That doesn't cover mainstream distribution. Fair use is only "intermediate copying" for translation. That doesn't mean copyright doesn't apply. Even the part you quoted still refers to it as "copyrighted material" and "copyrighted BIOS".

It absolutely covers the distribution of your implementation of the unprotected ideas and elements.

Re: Libogc (Wii homebrew library) discovered to contain code stolen from RTEMS

#100

Post by giovannibajo1 »

TuxSH wrote: post #17
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #4

How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean room and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary software? One can easily find a bazillion of "github repos" that distribute what is evidently directly decompiled game code with minimal cleanup. Bonus points if they also claim it is OK as long as the game art is not distributed, which in addition to being wrong is disrespectful to developers as a whole.…

> How much "reverse engineering" these days really is clean room and how much of it is just ripping off proprietary software? In Nintendo console hacking scenes? None at all, there is no point to it, going through the hassle of doing cleanroom as an individual is wasted effort. Though, the spectrum between copy-pasting HexRays output verbatim and rewriting things yourself is fairly large.

The Nintendo 64 homebrew scene uses libdragon which is 100% clean room, 100% based on reverse engineering, is fully open source and allows to create ROMs with no proprietary libraries.
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