Hacker News Reader

Comment by j16sdiz | Hacker News Reader

Owning the original game does not automatically grant you right to make or use in derivative works.

Not exactly, but under US copyright law there is a limitation of exclusive rights that grants the owner of a copy the right to make an adaptation provided "that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner". Unfortunately, the law doesn't specify what "adaptation" means, and I'm not sure the concept of an "essential step" stretches to cover modifying your program to run on a new OS decades after its original host platform has gone extinct.

Regardless, making such a modification for personal use only would be hard for a copyright owner to win a lawsuit over even if they could find out about it. But publicly distributing your derivative work like this is definitely violating the original's copyrights.

Well, I claim that there is no violating of Original copyright whatsoever. The repository doesn't contain any of the contents of the original game disks or any of the files. You could argue that I used a small parts of the work, but that can only fall under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use doctrine.

It is complicated.

Many games license art works from third parties, in which the game house agreed only to use that art work in one game title.

E.g. a sound track on a game may feel like a small part of the whole game, but it can the complete work from a music producer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com