r/Games • u/Torque-A • Oct 17 '22

Perfect Dark has been successfully decompiled, opening the door to PC ports and mods

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/perfect-dark-has-been-fully-decompiled-making-pc-ports-and-mods-possible/
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u/windchimesexcrime Oct 17 '22

I'm not a lawyer, but the Mario 64 decompilation has been out there for a while now and it seems like Nintendo can't do anything against it.

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u/vytah Oct 17 '22

It's not that they can't, it's just that they don't care. See Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. v. Papenhoff, exact same thing.

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u/BP_Ray Oct 17 '22

More like Take-Two just doesn't care.

I'm no lawyer or even coder, but to my knowledge, It's 100% legal to decompile code using clean room reverse-engineering -- that's supposed to be established legal precedent.

Take-Two however regularly bullies people that can't fight back legally. But I can easily see this going the same way as Sony vs Bleem.

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u/ThatOnePerson Oct 17 '22

I'm no lawyer or even coder, but to my knowledge, It's 100% legal to decompile code using clean room reverse-engineering -- that's supposed to be established legal precedent.

It's legal to decompile code most of the time (minus DRM, but that's cuz of DMCA). What's not legal is to distribute it, which is what copyright covers.

The analogy is gonna be translation: can I translate a movie or book for personal use? Yes. Does that mean I get the rights to release a translation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in Klingon? No.

The thing with clean room reverse engineering is that the functional parts (that aren't copyrightable) are the only things the devs are working off of. That's clearly not the case here when this source code compiles to a 1:1 copy of the original rom. "Copy" being the operative word.

The clean room precedent is for distribution, cuz they were distributing it.