| > There is a significant amount of legal precedent that protects decompilation and reverse engineering and it is explicitly protected by copyright laws as fair us This is mostly for _interoperability_ and _never_ as a way to sidestep copyright entirely. At most, you are able to redistribute the portion that is minimally indispensable for interoperability, and _not the entire friggin program_. That would completely defeat the point of copyright. And _even_ when you do this for interoperability, you have to walk a very tight rope (e.g. cleanroom as discussed by the sibling comment, albeit clean room is actually not necessary in many jurisdictions), but obviously _nothing_ of this applies if you're just going to distribute the entire program, interoperability be damned, which you simply _cannot_ do (clean room or not). Otherwise, what is this legal precedent you are talking about? N.B. I have dedicated a significant chunk of my professional career to reverse engineer (competitor's) industrial software: file formats, protocols, interfaces, the lot. > People decompiling are not publishing binary blobs. They’re painstakingly writing C code that has never existed before. They own the copyright to that new, original, creative work. Nah. You're looking at the original binary in one screen and writing code on the other one _to implement the same game_. Just by that, it would already be a pretty much straightforward copyright violation. But there's more! By your own admission, it even compiles to the same binary. This is a process (decompilation) that can even be fully automated! What is the creative process here? You put fancier doodles on the margins and comments? You changed the variable and function names, like a freshman trying to hide the fact that his assignment is plagiarized from another student's? This is such a textbook violation of copyright I'm not even sure it would actually be worth to use as an example on a textbook. What is next, if I get nuns to write out the binary in hexadecimal using a painstaking manual process (say knitting it on bed linen), then they can distribute the result and even use it to play the original game? I'm sure the knitting would be very original and creative! For the record even if I was only looking at a gameplay video (not the binary!) while writing my "new C program", that would still be, very easy to argue, a copyright violation. How many Tetris clones have been shut down this way? Now imagine if you have something that produces bit-for-bit identical output, as you would from decompilation. BTW which blog is giving out this often parroted non-sensical justification for violating copyright, since it's like the 3rd time I see it repeated here almost line by line? Then when Nintendo comes in and lawfully shuts down the repo, of course cue the crying. |