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Comment by CodeArtisan | Hacker News Reader

Be cautious that publishing source code generated in part or entirely from decompilation of copyrighted content may take you to court.

https://torrentfreak.com/take-two-sues-enthusiasts-behind-gt...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28402640

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I suspect the much more recent news article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28809559 may have encouraged the author to publish this... and he was looking for a bug to fix, after all.

That lets you decompile and likely publish a patch, not publish the complete derived source.

Patch for what though? Is the ability to use a patch taken into account because a patch to clang on Linux and a patch to appleclang on Mac have very different interpretations

Binary patches exist; there are fairly reasonable arguments that distributing binary patches (in a format that does not significantly contain the original work, e.g. bsdiff) is at least fair use, or possibly not a copyright problem at all.

Could you make the argument (not here) that binary patches are not a reasonable way of distributing a patch for a program that is frequently updated?

Doesn't the Chrome updater use binary patches?

https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/softwar...

The patch, of course, is covered by a separate copyright.

But there's hundreds of decompiled copies of Super Mario 64 on github and have been for years. Where's their court cases?

if the purpose of the decompilation is for reverse engineering and api compatibility, there's a fair use argument.

So the OP would need to show that the purpose is indeed for reverse engineering. IANAL, so don't actually do it...

Decompiling may be legal, but publishing the decompiled source is almost always a copyright violation.

Interoperability is an argument for the legality of decompilation itself (i.e. you can ignore EULA clauses that say otherwise); it doesn't make the resulting code copyright-free or automatically eligible for fair use.

The path to fixing the law is doing it anyway, letting the takedowns come, and then harnessing the collective frustration of people who want to see the things they grew up with be preserved.

There are reasonable fair use arguments to be made around preservation indeed (just look at what archive.org does). They just have nothing to do with the decompilation for interoperability story.

Why?

Because copyright. The decompiled code is a derivative work of the binary, and thus subject to its original copyright.

You can make fair use arguments in some cases, but "I decompiled it for interoperability" isn't one of those. That just lets you decompile it privately (for analysis/research), not publish the resulting code.

That's still a handwavy answer.

I worked with game RE for a long time and the only way that publishers were able to go after people was if they used game assets. The decompiled code was, as far as I was ever aware, free game. There was almost always manual intervention to get it to build.

That's really not a safe assumption to make. The publishers may not have wanted to go after people but I wouldn't be betting on winning a court case against them over this.

If decompiled code were fair use, you could take any application, decompile it, and re-publish it for free. It doesn't make any sense. Decompilation is a mechanical transformation, and the manual edits that come after to make it work do not significantly alter the nature of the work. It is clearly a derivative work of the original, so you're left with fair use arguments, and there certainly isn't any universal "well it's a game and it's just the code, not the assets" fair use argument.

The game asset thing applies to reimplemented games like OpenTTD, which are independently implemented and then ask to be combined with legally sourced assets. That's very different than a decompiled game.

It wasn't "free game". It just isn't worth the effort to prove code was copied.

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