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Comment by happa | Hacker News Reader

What is the legal status of recompilation projects like these? Greyer or less grey than emulators?

It's sad that we even have to think about this. Ogre Battle 64 is 27 years old now. Under the law that preceded the Copyright Act of 1976, it would be entering the public domain right about now.

It's absurd how long we've made copyright terms, and it's really endangering preservation.

> endangering preservation

Luckily preservationists are found outside such ridiculous jurisdictions, and most recognized titles have been preserved for a long while already.

True I just wish they didn't have to skulk in the dark for what is essentially a public service. I also think some projects aren't so lucky.

We probably have a pretty brief window where projects like this can even be done where there's people alive who worked on the original systems. It would be nice if these were encouraged rather than being in some gray area.

More infringing than emulators. De/recompilation projects are pretty clearly 'derivative works' of the original copyrighted program code, even if they require the original ROM in order to extract other assets necessary to compile a fully playable artifact.

The closer analogy would be fan-translation patches, which are also pretty clearly copyright-infringing derivative works though generally tolerated by rights holders.

Companies often encourage (or at least turn a blind eye to) creative derivative works from fan communities, especially if they're non-commercial and aren't cutting into the market share of their own official products enough for them to take notice.

This is a recomp project, not a decomp project; the original binary is supplied by the user, mechanically translated into source code at an architecture level (rather than a human-readable level), and patched. It’s AOT dynamic recompilation and the original IP isn’t distributed.

I do agree that decompilation projects are obviously not transformative (the only fair use feet they really have to stand on are purpose and market effect), but recomp projects are a little more interesting and might live on much less shaky footing.

Thank you for explaining this. I had the exact same misunderstanding as the parent poster, and was only corrected (and educated) by reading your comment.

A hypothetical relating to the legal aspects: Since this was mostly done by an LLM, the legal considerations would become incredibly interesting in cases where the original code (source or binary) was illegally leaked. What happens if the LLM saw the leaked code in its training material?

(My non-lawyer brain thinks it's completely obvious that in that case you have a derived work, but apparently the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived, so what the hell do I know…)

> the world has decided that it's completely fine to train LLMs on e.g. GPL code without the output being considered derived

I think it's more of a "the constitution is not a suicide pact" approach to GPL: while the GPL is obviously violated by its inclusion in the training corpus, we have two options:

- demand the destruction of LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works and the training of new ones

- accept that LLMs that are trained on copyrighted or copylefted works are more important to humanity than the rights of the authors

Well if it's the second, then surely I can train my LLM using the frontier labs' models too? And have my LLM "interpret and reproduce" GTA 6?

How is any of this going to work out if we just decide to throw out copyright like this?

(I am well aware that it is not currently technically feasible to copyright-wash GTA 6. Replace that game with a best-selling novel or whatever.)

And, if we do decide that copyright is just gone, can we please make laws to that effect? Instead of just shrugging our shoulders and going "oh well, this new thing is useful, so we'll let it slide, but don't you dare to pirate movies, because reasons!"

I think you are being misguided. The repository itself contains disassembly directly from the copyrighted ROM, and is thus not original work.

> What happens if the LLM saw the leaked code in its training material?

Exactly the same that would happen if the LLM saw GPLed code in its training material and was asked to replicate it

> It’s AOT dynamic recompilation and the original IP isn’t distributed.

The Git repository contains tens of thousands of lines of assembler code that seem to come from the original.

I see that now… why did they check it in? One of the whole points of this approach is that that assembler should be trivial to re-derive by the end user since it’s just the original program listing. Some of the Xbox 360 recomp projects like https://github.com/mchughalex/skate3recomp offer a better example of how this pattern can be achieved without distributing the binary at any intermediate level.

It's basically the same as emulation as long as the recompiled code doesn't get distributed (which this project doesn't do AFAIK). Functionally the only difference between a "recomp" and traditional console emulation is that the assembly code that the CPU runs is translated to C then compiled to native code, rather than being interpreted or JIT compiled at runtime. Traditionally recompilation was mainly used when porting games to platforms where the emulation overhead would have been too much, like if you were making a GBA port of a Sega Genesis game. With these enhanced ports, I guess the idea is that if you're making a game specific "emulator" anyway, you might as well recompile the code and get rid of the overhead of interpretation.

Note that this isn't the same as a "decomp" where the goal is to make readable source code that resembles something that the original developers would have worked with. A "recomp" simply translates the assembly instructions to C. You end up with "assembly code but in C" rather than idiomatic C code.

I'm not aware of legal trouble involving the the Zelda 64 recomp project, which would have a much higher chance of attracting the attention of big N (especially now that a new version of OoT is coming out).

At least in the way that I see it, a recomp is like building your own turntable to play your vinyl records, after stydying their grooves and infering how they would sound (so I guess that it would be less gray than an emulator).

IIRC, EU have some laws protecting "interoperability", i.e. making a program work on other platforms. I suspect decompiling is considered as "interoperability".

No one can say anything, no game rom is ever bundled in the official releases of these recomps. We always have to provide the roms. Where from, it's another story.

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