Take-Two Sues Enthusiasts Behind GTA Fan Projects Re3 and ReVC
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
You can release a remaster of an old game, but any reverse-engineered version would be competing with it.
The Console HD (Well 720p) remasters of the 3D GTAs don't even compete with the original versions with mods imo :-P.
They are the ported from the mobile ports of the games, have tons of bugs (Edit: some of the bugs on the 360 stem from RROD issues on consoles that have just not yet RROD'ed), break many of the game mechanics and redender models like trash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhVdb4K1M-M <- Sa comparisons as an example
(Note: I know you are on about how mods / RE projects compete with offical releases from a product standpoint, not a quality standpoint. Just wanted to say that RS had their chance to improve the longevity of the older 3D titles and they fucked it up)
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 the same time, a group of reverse engineers had decompiled the original ROM, converted it to readable C, and added many improvements: 60FPS, widescreen support, high res textures, etc. Most notably, the project allowed them to compile the source code to native Switch architecture, which greatly improved performance and power consumption.
Most enthusiasts would agree that the “fan project” is objectively a better experience.
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.
Technically, that's correct of course. But realistically, how many people will build one of these projects from the source code they obtained from GitHub, download the game assets from somewhere and spend a lot of time to make it all work on their machine instead of just buying the remastered version? Some, sure, but I don't see Rockstar losing a lot of money here.
If I were in their shoes I would simply hire these developers. And leave their fan projects alone as a sign of good-will and generosity towards the community.
They released pre-built files. You download the stock version from steam like normal then unpack the pre-built files over the top replacing some of the original files (Just like many of the mods for these games).
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-...
That doesn't provide the same buzz as ruinous legal action
I don't support this action by Take-Two but I think this is more of a legal situation rather than a, "How dare they try to rip off our game?" situation.
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 have the right to distribute copyrighted files, but we do have a right to repair broken software, just like we have the right to repair other things we own, and we certainly have a right to help others do the same.
That might change if it goes viral tho.
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.
> Defendants are well aware that they do not possess the right to copy, adapt, or distribute derivative GTA source code, or the audiovisual elements of the Games, and that doing so constitutes copyright infringement.
I think the opposite is true, what they did was fair use. The defendants are outside US, pretty sure everything they did was 100% legal in their jurisdictions.
> Defendants have made the Games fully and freely available to the public
They have made the game engine (the .exe) freely available to the public. To run the game, one also needs assets of the game.
Assets require overwhelming majority of disk space, take overwhelming majority of development budget to produce, and can be obtained legally by buying the original game.
There's just no way that it's fair use to distribute a decompiled copy of a game. Reverse engineering and decompiling are generally legal, but they don't strip away copyrights from the code.
Think about it this way... compiling source code does not change who has the copyright on the code. Decompiling source code does not change it either. Cleaning up the output from IDA or Ghidra does not magically strip away copyright.
If I went to a Broadway show and sat down with a pad of staff paper so I could transcribe all the songs, and then put my transcriptions up on GitHub, I could get sued by the composer and the composer would win.
That’s not what these people did. A source code of a re-implementation of a game engine is not a copy of the game. I have compiled and tested that thing, but it was only legal for me to do so because I had the original one bought on Steam.
> I could get sued by the composer
Right. “The great thing about this country is you can sue anyone for pretty much anything, and you probably win. Or at least, get a settlement.” https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Rakin_and_Ponzer
Yes, it is. They decompiled it with tools like IDA Pro and Ghidra, and then they cleaned up and refactored the results.
> ... but it was only legal for me to do so because I had the original one bought on Steam.
Whether it's legal for you to run the program is a separate issue. The fact is: the code is distributed to anyone who can access GitHub, not only people who have legitimate copies of GTA3.
> “The great thing about this country is you can sue anyone for pretty much anything, and you probably win.
It should have been clear that I was saying that 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?
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 what most of the rock/pop music books at your local music store contain.
There's a market for people who want to learn to play The Beatles, so a skilled musician will listen to a Beatles record and transcribe all of the parts, an engraver will lay it out on the page, and a publishing company will negotiate with the rightsholders for a license.
You'll see many different versions of the same song, if you go down to the store. Some of the differences are due to different transcription choices, and other differences are simplifications or arrangements for different skill levels, different instruments, or other reasons. All of them are different, but the composer credit will be the same.
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.
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.
>> 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?
N=1, but when I was in high school, I remember that several friends in the drama/theatre department were really disappointed one year because they'd performed a copyrighted play the year before for our school (at no charge; our principal firmly believed that charging the $1 admission they typically charged separated the "haves" from the "have-nots"), the board of education received a letter from the copyright holder, and now they were no longer able to do any plays for the school.
I guess this doesn't touch whether or not this has been tested in court, but it certainly scared the pants off our board of education.
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 more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel.
I don't know about fair use, but if the defendants are not in the US, then the concept of fair use is not even necessarily in play.
The suit is filed in California so I imagine that Fair Use, and the rest of the US legal code, is in play.
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 are not typical of human programmers, but typical for how you get decompiled code to run.
Modern decompilers are a lot better than you might think. Additionally, old compilers produced code that is easier to decompile than you might think. But, here's a sample of code from the re3 repository in question:
uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockHours = *(uint8*)0x95CDA6;
uint8 &CClock::ms_nGameClockMinutes = *(uint8*)0x95CDC8;
uint16 &CClock::ms_nGameClockSeconds = *(uint16*)0x95CC7C;
> 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 more like watching a movie, summarizing the plot, and then plugging back the holes to make another movie that has the same feel.
It's like someone transcribing the screenplay for a movie. The stage directions are going to be different, but it's still the same movie.
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.
The aim of this project is to reverse GTA III for PC by replacing parts of the game one by one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus such that we have a working game at all times.
Gonna be interesting to see the 2400 years old thought experiment tested in a modern US court :-)
Decompilation / reverse engineering is very different from "transcribing" a play. 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. You would certainly not get the original drawings or CAD files back out of it. You do not decompile "source code", but machine code, and the source code you get back is not a recreation of the original copyrighted code, but the decompiler's analysis of the machine instructions, stripped of the original design and intent (the creative work part which makes source code copyrightable in the first place).
Measurements (or information) in general is not copyrightable, despite what IP protectionism claims, and in this analogy the machine code is much closer to the mechanical pieces of the car that make it work than the original designs. Either way, the fair use / reverse engineering provisions already create an exemption.
The questions is wether there are enough legal loopholes to squash these generally allowed uses through some other parts of the law or licensing terms, eg. by claiming that some IP (patents, trade secrets) are infringed some other way by publishing the reverse engineered code.
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.
Photographs of artwork such as paintings or statues are routinely seen to be infringements of the original work. So it is not unique to software. There are lots of demarcations and corner cases for this... for example, if you install your statue in public, you no longer have grounds to sue people for photographing it. If the statue is a minor part of a photograph, then it's not infringement.
Same applies to software. This is well-tread ground, by this point. People have been reverse engineering and copying software for a long time.
> 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.
Copyright protects original works of authorship. There is nothing in copyright law that talks about something's "literal nature" or different "information streams". For example, if I write a song, I am still the author of the song even when that song is performed--even though that requires a significant amount of interpretation, transformation, and creativity on the part of the musicians. I am still the author.
Likewise, if I write a book about a character named Jean-Luc Picard, who is the bald captain of a captain of a spaceship in my made-up universe, Paramount has grounds to sue for copyright infringement.
Copyright law talks mostly about very ordinary terms like authorship. Authorship survives all sorts of transformations... not infinitely so, but neither decompilation nor refactoring will change who the author of a program is.
In France it's legal to redistribute it if it's for "interopability purposes" which is very easy to defend in this case since RE3 is primarly used to make a massive amount of ports (Switch, Vita...) which would not exist without this project.
They are not, but AFAIK these concepts are somewhat close, at least on the high level.
The developers were not distributing the game, the game engine they made is useless without the assets. The developers probably obtained their copies of the games legally. AFAIK, their primary motivation was to make the game work better on modern computers (that’s why the rendering patches), and to make the game run on the platforms not supported by Rockstar such as ARM Linux on Raspberry Pi. The laws regulating reverse engineering often have exceptions for compatibility purpose. Most importantly, the developers have not profited from their work, they did it for fun.
Probably not, but they also uploaded the reverse-engineered source code and binaries to Github in the United States. They then filed DMCA counter-notices, which opens them up to personal jurisdiction in federal district court in the U.S., per 17 USC 512(g)(3)(D). [0].
This is from the CODING STYLE document:
"Don't just copy paste code from IDA, make it look nice"
https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3/blob/master/CODING_STYLE.m...
"Don't just copy paste code from IDA, pull it thru GitHub Copilot first"
From the filed complaint, Take-Two quote one of the developers :
> 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++
And although this probably has no relevance from a legal standpoint, but sounds pretty bad in the context of the complaint, from right at the bottom of https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3/blob/master/CODING_STYLE.m... :
> Generally, try to make the code look as if R* could have written it
It's a shame a simple take-down request wasn't sent (and complied with) first...
> The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit.
> 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++
I know, as a software developer, I don’t consider that fair use, and I very much doubt any reasonable person would either.
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.
Why would decompiling be different from compiling? In both cases, you are transforming code from one language to another and ending up with something "new", which is a derivative of the original. In any case, you can have a human come in and clean up, refactor, extend, or make changes... and the result is still a derivative of the original.
It doesn't really matter if you are doing it by hand or machine. I just don't see how that is relevant. There's a process involved where the input to that process is the original GTA 3, there's a bunch of steps, and the output to that process is code based on the original GTA 3 machine code, but in C or C++ instead of machine code.
There are two ways to get around this. The first way is fair use, which is complicated but certainly doesn't apply here. The other way is the "clean room" reverse engineering, where one team reverse engineers a product to figure out what it does, and produces a specification, which a second team uses to create a new implementation which does the same thing.
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.
As much as I support this kind of project, I would say they are legally screwed. But they already knew that when they started.
>After assessing its options, that’s exactly what the team did, leaving Take-Two just a couple of weeks to file a lawsuit to prevent the content reappearing on Github. When that time expired, the coding platform restored ‘re3’ and ‘reVC’, as per the law.
As far as I can tell, this is a pretty generous take on what happened.
The Take-Two counter notice [1] was filed by td512, who had a fork of the re3 repo, but doesn't seem to have any commits in the repo, so it's kinda hard to call him part of the team. And his reasoning for filing the counter notice was that the repo contained "no code owned by Take Two", which is a bit questionable (I guess it's now up for the court to decide) since the code is decompiled and then cleaned up. Meanwhile in May, Ash R., who I believe is part of the re3 team (and is in fact beind sued as Doe 1), posted on Twitter [2] about how the team was close to filing a counter notice before the news of the repo being restored hit the news, potentially tanking the whole project.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/04/2021-04-0...
[2] https://twitter.com/Ash_735/status/1391916368166113280
EDIT: Actually, it looks like there are two more counter claims as per the suit, however they seem to have been filed after the initial counter claim was filed and indeed after the repository was restored / news of the restoration were reported on. The first [3] seems like a carbon copy of the first claim while the second one [4] seems a bit more carefully worded.
[3] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/05/2021-05-1...
[4] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2021/06/2021-06-1...
> “In at least three separate instances between April and June of 2021, Defendants Orçunus, Morra, and Graber submitted sworn counter notifications to GitHub claiming the takedown of the repositories was mistaken or otherwise not legitimate,” the lawsuit reads.
> “Take-Two is informed and believes, and on that basis alleges, that these counter notifications were made in bad faith, and knowingly and deliberately misrepresented to GitHub the contents of the re3 GitHub Repositories.”
It really isn’t fair to put all of this legalese in front of laypeople (and in this case, laypeople in other countries/legal systems) and then allow highly experienced corporate attorneys to nitpick their obviously inadequate understanding of the language and its implications.
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-Two losing any significant amount of income from this enthusiast project, but I could be wrong and I am willing to be corrected.
I thought that was only trademarks?
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.
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?
Does anyone know the legal status of this project?