Are you using the word "theft" colloquially or literally?
I'm just curious, people consider this theft?
I'm just curious, people consider this theft?
With PDF the better analogy would be producing LaTeX file(s) that correspond to that PDF, without owning the original LaTeX file(s).
A bit tangential, but you can also try to look at this logically. The number of instructions in the binary is limited. So the probability to get "substantially similar" binaries is higher than, say, with a book (for the same architecture of course). Plus as I mentioned, the videogame is not just a binary, it's also some assets with which the binary works. And we are not touching the assets since they are mostly independent of the architecture.
This is not correct. Some types of reverse engineering are legal.
> As is emulation. Which means there should be no legal issues with getting the source code of a binary executable, and then modifying it to work on another system.
These are actually two of the exceptions. You CAN reverse engineer it to make it operative but that doesn't mean you can distribute the re-engineered binary.
They could have released a patching mechanism that used the original binary, but just releasing the re-engineered binary is illegal.
I can only judge from the cases I know about regarding videogames. The two instances where publishers decided to intervene via a cease and desist letter or DMCA takedown: fan-made Metroid 2 remake (AM2R) and reverse engineering of GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas. Both Nintendo and Take-Two were making their own remakes of those games at the time, so they probably saw it as a threat to their profits.
But a lot of decompilations and ports have been made without any intervention from the publishers (at least from my knowledge). Diablo 1 has both a decompilation (code and exe) and a port. N64's Zeldas also have both, which is interesting since Nintendo is known for issuing DMCAs, and they also have a remake of Ocarina of Time currently in the works, so there should be enough reason to take down such projects (like they did with Metroid 2). I assume they are not doing anything because it's just the binary being distributed.