re3, (reverse engineered open source code of GTAIII / Vice City) taken down with DMCA notice
For all of us PS vita enthusiasts, the past few months have seen a countless stream of releases related to GTA, thanks in particular to developers The Flow, Rinnegatamante, and aap. The three developers have recently released Vita ports of several popular GTA games, such as Vice City a few days ago. Those ports were based on the recently released “re3” source code, a fully reverse engineered version of the official binaries.
Unfortunately, the legal aspects of re3 where cloudy to say the least. The people originally behind this work stated themselves on the github repository: “We don’t feel like we’re in a position to give this code a license.”.
Take Two Interactive seemed to see it this way as well, and sent a DMCA to github in order to take down the repository, as well as all its forks. As of a few hours ago, the github repositories related to the project all lead to an error message, pointing to the dmca request. As for the request itself, it is unequivocal:
The content in the links below consists of copyrighted materials owned by Take-Two. The use of our copyrighted content in these links are unauthorized and it should be removed immediately.
I personally doubt anybody will question that move, even if it totally sucks. With that being said, it is possible a cleaner version of the reverse engineered work could surface, as the repository allegedly contained binary fonts and “story” files. Arguably, reverse engineered code alone, without any art/design would be legally harder to take down. But maybe the folks behind re3 don’t have the legal resources to fight that battle anyway.
As for the impact for the Vita community: the ports are already out and available, and I’m convinced it will always be possible to find them somewhere, even if a decision is made to take them down from e.g. vitadb (at the time of this writing, the games are still available on vitadb. Get them while you can?). But whether they ever get updated, modded, or improved moving forward is a big question mark.
Once again, Take Two Interactive are completely in their right to ask for that take down legally, but from an ethical perspective, it sucks that a console that was never given any love by the publisher could now be impacted by such a decision.
We need bully for ps vita :'(
This is outrageous. I feel like pirating every Take Two Interactive title they throw on the market. Take that !
I didnt play my vita for a couple years, but im glad yesterday i decided to install all 3 gta even though i was exceptical about how they will run, but i couldnt be more wrong, they run like a charm. Thanks to everyone that made this possible.
If 3 guys could do this, why didnt take two release them in the first place, i mean is not like they would have to invest that much to do it right?
What were they thinking actually? They didn’t want scrutiny from Take Two Interactive yet they let someone at Euronet take an article about the project! Like whatdefok?
glad i got all files for all 3 gta’s while they’re still there 🙂 sucks that they got a dmca takedown but as wololo pointed out i guess take two has all the rights to do that :/
Made a torrent of the removed github repos I had downloaded (PC, Vita, Switch versions). Also includes Vita builds.
http://btcache.me/torrent/B55AC77DB29181235F17A0D78514409C3E127E90
or
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:b55ac77db29181235f17a0d78514409c3e127e90&tr=udp://tracker.openbittorrent.com:80&tr=udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce
Made a torrent of the removed github repos (PC, Vita, Switch versions). Also includes Vita builds.
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:b55ac77db29181235f17a0d78514409c3e127e90
Take-Two really doesn’t actually have much legal standing to claim both of the repos in their entirety, both were properly and legally reverse engineered and code shared for the purpose of interoperability (aka porting). See 17 U.S. Code § 1201(f), with the legality of EULAs coming into question there’s not even much room to claim contract law violation, but even if they did that’d be a case outside of the powers allotted by the DMCA, meaning Take-Two has likely violated the law themselves here.
What? So, according to you, anyone with the skills can take whomever’s code, decrypt and modify it, and the code no longer belongs to its writer? Also, where are you getting “contract law”? The game files were decrypted and re-written, which, sure, is technically allowed, but in no way can you distribute it beyond yourself.
I think I heard somewhere that they were clean room reverse engineered. If that claim is true, then Take Two has no rights to pull this kind of… action.
There’s a key difference between “decryption” and reverse engineering. “Decryption” typically refers to converting a string of numbers back into assets (machine code, texture, models, etc.) by dividing the input numbers by a commonly shared key.
Reverse engineering involves taking apart code down to individual instructions and then recreating the plain text code that leads to that set of instructions. In this case it was done “clean room” style for maximum legality across the entirety of the United Nations. In “Clean Room” 1 dev breaks down the original machine binary into unlabeled code (this is known as decompilation, and is these days partially automated with “Ghidra”) and reads it enough to describe what each code block does to another dev who hasn’t seen the results of the decompilation. The second developer, through only examining the original machine code and the description given of what it does, writes new, labeled code (AKA “Source Code”) of their own to recreate the functions of each code block. That resulting code, so long as it doesn’t infringe on any software patents (a stipulation which doesn’t typically apply to videogames) or copyrighted Intellectual Property (Art, Sounds, and 3D models) can be then licensed in any manner they choose and published freely by the second developer, typically under a Creative Commons Non Commercial license out of courtesy to the program’s original developers, but it can also be distributed as MIT (basically, do what you please with it, nobody cares).
It’s thanks to “Clean Room” reverse engineering that we have modern console Emulators that don’t require proprietary BIOS dumps, the WINE project, DXVK (and by extension Valve’s Proton), the SDKs used to (legally) create the various home brew games in part use code created via Clean Room for various hardware calls and whatnot, and much, MUCH more.
If you’re curious, Ghidra is a tool developed jointly by the CIA and NSA to help them do their own clean room reverse engineering, and was later published under an open source MIT license. Because as far as the US courts are concerned even the United States government itself is beholden to copyright law. Just as well, the process itself has been used by intelligence agencies under the UN worldwide since the early days of computing. That’s how well legally sanctioned the process is.
I’m happy that i got a Vita a few days ago with all 3 GTA games installed.
That sucks.
But everyone still can download pirated torrents of these games…
Why they don’t allow to port these games to other systems 🙁