Take Two have filed a lawsuit against the creators of Re3 (GTA reverse engineering open source project)
GTA fans are reporting that Take Two, the company that owns Rockstar and the GTA franchise, have just filed a lawsuit against the developers behind Re3. Re3/ReVC is the GTA Reverse engineering project that, among other things, recently made it possible to play GTA III on the PS Vita and Nintendo Switch.
The Lawsuit, which can be found here, alleges that the people behind the GTA III reverse engineering project Re3 (and some of its forks) has caused and continues to cause “irreparable harm” to Take Two.
Who is being sued?
Take Two are suing multiple developers behind ReVC, Re3, and some of its forks. Namely:
- Angelo Papenhoff, a.k.a. aap (creator/lead dev on Re3/reVC)
- Theo Morra (fork creator/owner)
- Eray Orçunus (lead dev on Re3/ReVC)
- Adrian Graber (Nintendo Switch port)
- Ash R./Ash_735 (active dev)
- Sergeanur
- Nick007J
- Fire-Head
Are Take Two’s claims legit?
Take Two are saying that reverse engineering of their games consists in copyright infringement, which is legally a stretch in most countries of the world. With the right lawyer, this could go either way.
Reverse engineering in itself is considered fair use in the US, but people who agree to the GTA III User License agreement waive these rights, at least in the US (whether this kind of EULA clause is legal for developers who contributed outside of the US remains to be seen). Take Two would have to be able to prove that the Reverse Engineers actually saw and accepted the EULA, which is probably hard to prove.
As far as distributing such reverse engineering work, this is probably where it gets trickier. This is generally illegal, but there are exceptions around compatibility between different programs. One could allege that making the game compatible with the OS of the PS Vita, the Nintendo Switch, or fixing game breaking bugs on Windows platforms, counts as a possibly legal use case. Making a game interoperable with other platforms, provided that the game is acquired legally (which is the case that Re3 and ReVC fall under: one needs to have the original game in order to play Re3 and ReVC) has been considered as legal, in the past, in the US.
In other words, Take Two possibly have a very fragile case here, and if the defendants could find a lawyer that will match the sh*t ton of Money that Take Two is probably pouring into their legal representative, they have a solid chance.
Fans reaction to Take Two suing a fanmade project
Fans of Rockstar and of the homebrew scene alike are not pleased with Take Two’s decision to start a lawsuit. Suing independent developers over a twenty year old game that has already been milked to death, is perceived like nothing but corporate greed.
Having read the case I’m disappointed with Take-Two and Rockstar. These are just fans that love your game and now may potentially hurt them financially. The older games do not work well with W10/W11 due to compatibility issues on Windows 10/11, just why… This isn’t a big deal.
— Ben (@videotech_) September 3, 2021
Furthermore, the content of the lawsuit tries really hard to make it look like the people behind these reverse engineering projects acted in bad faith and together. That’s how these things are written, but the way their lawyers wrote it, you’d think these ten guys were after Take Two and wanted the company to be destroyed :/
In what feels like a David vs Goliath battle, we can only hope things will end ok for the folks behind these ports. Most likely though, this will end outside of courts, with the projects deleted from github, the reverse engineers signing some NDA and accepting to not touch any Rockstar software ever, and this will most likely be the end of the projects…
In the meantime, you can enjoy Re3 and reVC for your Vita and your switch here:
Update: per request from the developers behind these forks, we have taken down the Vita and Switch download links for now. Looks like Take Two’s intimidation campaign is working as planned.
Source: @videotech_
Damn. We really need to figure out some better rules around intellectual property. People deserve to get paid, but this is ridiculous.
Good luck, copyright laws are not meant for the average user. They are made by companies for companies.
There already was something done about this.
In ‘Atari v. Nintendo’, the court ruled that reverse engineering code is a fair use. Atari was found guilty of copyright infringement as the code they claimed they reverse engineered was indeed stolen.
However, in this situation, if used as a support for the defense, it might just go through.
Edit: “Atari Games v Nintendo”, not “Atari v. Nintendo”.
“irreparable harm” lmao
Yeah, it’s an absolutely laughable statement but just typical legal jargon BS
If anyone is going to destroy Take Two, it’s their own lawyers dragging their name through the mud right alongside their development houses as they chase frivolous lawsuit after frivolous lawsuit.
This is all because of the upcoming so called “remastered” ports. they want all available alternatives be deleted from github and other sources online
I’m showing Take-Two my IQ (middle finger).
So… 1? xD
Message from me 2 each of the Take-Two team members: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m_8lARPqbhU&t=73s
&
GAMERS TRYING TO PLAY GTA PORTS HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR *** ! THET TOOK IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL MAKING IT PORTABLE AND BASICALLY IT’S HARDCORE WORK YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO VOTE AGAINST SINCE YOU DIDN’T HELPED THEM WITH PORTING IT AT ALL !
*Mumbling the highest disrespectfull swears in his native language
rIGHT iN tHE fEELS, yEAH ?
Yet another reason to hate Rockstar games. It’s getting ridiculous.
Leave these guys alone or hire them. They are mad because they couldn’t see the potential of porting these games over to these console in terms of money of course. These few intelligent people did what all these companies couldn’t. So they say omg they still play these games, they are so many. That is illegal, we might release our versions of these games , instead of releasing flying bikes for gta v, for a few extra cash. These people who messed with us , maybe they’re poor and will go to prison. If not , we will take all of their money , so not bad. At least they will stop giving to people what they want
The Key here is that you have to buy the game and provide youre own purchased gamefiles for this to work. In other words Buy the game to play it
I ment “pay for the game to play” in the end 😛
The VitaDB links lead to empty pages. Seems they were removed since this post was written.
Yes. They got rid of ALL Rockstar titles including GTA ports, Max Payne and Bully 🙁
The Vita port of Re3’s GitHub page is gone as well. I just hope someone is going to upload some cached version of it (maybe torrent or w/e)
TEEEEEEENTHHHH!!
For real though, f u ck Take 2.
Do we need to launch a petition to force take two to abandoned the pursuit ? You don’t want i play old school on the device of my choice ? *** GTA 6 ! Gamer pays for your game, don’t *** with us…
Petitions never work. There would have to be massive backlash from really big youtubers and online influencers for them to possibly even care. Unless it’s some PR nightmare for them, they’ll continue on business as usual. Even that would probably have no effect. These big companies just don’t give a damn and it looks really bad.
Oh wow, a petition. Take two will surely back down after they see that!
Take-Two being Take-Two, as usual.
okkk
Well I wasn’t really gonna buy a game from them again, now I have another reason apart from that they will never release gta 6
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if GTA 6 went full MMO and abandoned single player altogether. I’ll never get over that GTA5 didn’t get the single player dlc that wad alluded to way back in the day because the stupid multiplayer was/is just too profitable. Atleast we got RDR2 but it’s not the same thing. The fans of single player gta games enjoyed the games and built up their popularity due to that aspect and then all the kids got involved and ruined it for everyone else.
I have no doubt that 6 will come out eventually but if it just focuses on the online aspect even more then I don’t have a ton of faith in it. I really hope they prove me wrong though.
and rdr2 is absolutly unplayable. its worse now than cyberpunk was at its release.
there is just absolutly no hopes for this compagny.
but they stay up befauce *** people keep buying shard card , and why ? because the game is unplayable ( be it because of modders , griefers , kids with flying bike , impossible to finish a single *** delivery mission , never ending loading black screen , crash because of corrupt save character data because servers are extremly bad , and so on ).
Take2 and Rockstar knows this is not gonna go anywhere as this would also apply to fair use just like how EA reverse engineered the Sega Megadrive\Genesis, the same way that Connectix and Bleem reversed engineered the original Playstation to create their emulator.
The only thing they need to do is prove that they haven’t used any of Rockstar’s code in court and they are gonna win this case.
It’s the same reason why Nintendo has not sued the guy that reverse engineered the code of Super Mario 64 that is because they know they will lose in court which is a very odd move from them since they are known to be trigger happy with lawsuits plus they just finished the de-compilation of The Legend of Zelda OOT once that has been reverse engineered then the game can be ported to any platform which I am sure Nintendo doesn’t want to happen but they can’t do a darn thing about it.
Take2 is just aiming to make an example of these guys by bringing them to court and having them waste a lot of money in their defense really kinda petty of them to boot.
These devs should’ve stayed anonymous, reload their stuff on TOR sites then let it propagate to other sites.
Which has more users to contribute?
Github > A self-hosted Gitea instance on tor.
RE3 wouldn’t be what it is if they made it less accessible.
You just saw Wololo caved and removed the links. If they would’ve released it anonymously on TOR then it’ll be harder to take down. Websites that are linked to real identity can be easily threatened by Big Tech. Hopefully devs learn from this and stay hidden.
Still doesn’t change the fact that hosting the source code on tor is a recipe to a failed open source project. If keeping my identity hidden were my concern, I would just create a fresh account with a pseudonym on a site such as Gitlab (unrelated but Github doesn’t respect the open source spirit.). By fresh I mean new email, pgp key, even ip address. It might seem overkill but you can never be too sure. A corporation would still be able to take it down but at least I wouldn’t get sued up the ***.
Exactly. You think they would’ve learned this by now. Especially people that work on Nintendo fan games. Seeing what happened to Metroid Prime 2D recently was a huge bummer
reverse enginering then is a crime.
are you a tard?, reverse engineering is not a crime
enought is enougth, is time to boycot take two???
apparently SA release page is also removed from github, despite being just a wraparound for android and not providing any game files itself.
If take2 was concerned with “irreparable damage” they should’ve done the sensible thing and released those games for the consoles they were ported to. Only one causing them any real harm at this point is themselves.
Maybe soon we will have a new remake of a trilogy (GTA3, Vice City, San Andreas) that is why they are suing these devs.
Money, money…
I thought reverse engineering projects like this usually required you to bring your own legally owned gamefiles and then you decompile and recompile into the port yourself using their decompiler and build scripts.. in these cases no actual sourcecode and no copyrighted files are distributed…
I guess this is not the case with Re3 then?
Look for “Take-Two Suing GTA3 Reverse Engineering devs…and it doesn’t look good | MVG” on YouTube.
Re3 (Mod GTA3) is again online of github. Just check this lonm
https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3
This from a company whose games glorify violent law breaking. Pathetic.
A game’s a game, reality is another thing. On the other hand… Pathetic? Totally agree
Oh God. My Brothers Name is in it…
Adrian Graber
My mother told him to stop that project bc of the consequences. He did not listen… :/
Fact is, even if it was 100% sure a good lawyer could win the cause, how are they supposed to gather the money for it? It’s not like 100€ or anything close to that. *** that, it’s obvious a big company, even if wrong, will win. I’m sick of this world.
In the meantime, it’s yet another case of rubbing their dicks with a pitiful showoff of “muh right of ownership of my IP” for a game that could possibly still give them a laughable amount of money over the *** android port, and that only, for an amount of loss limited to a part of the PS Vita owners. PS *** Vita. A console known for its huge fail. The reverse engineers simply did the work that Rockstar didn’t; porting the games like many wanted. Or are they actually planning of porting them on a dead device?
That, and their hindrance to open source development/projects are enough for me to totally say goodbye to both TakeTwo and Rockstar, as I had already done long ago.