I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from.
I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from.
Edit: And particularly there's tons of case law that this stuff isn't copyrightable, see Sony v. Bleem, where a company literally wrote an emulator of a PS1, and courts said that was fine. Even to straight up sell as a competing product, and for running on competitors machines.
Edit2: And the otherwise shitty DMCA even has explicit exemptions for software interoperability purposes.
There is a bit of a "intellectual property" slippy slope going on here. Whether or not something is useful or non-trivial is inconsequential.
You could design an engine to have an artistic structure. What you couldn't then do is stop anyone copying the functional parts of the engine and leaving out the purely artistic elements.