I'm currently reverse engineering a few games too. It's quite easy with AI now. But I'm worried about the legality of it all. Any thoughts on this?
I'm currently reverse engineering a few games too. It's quite easy with AI now. But I'm worried about the legality of it all. Any thoughts on this?
Worry about it when you get a C&D.
Many of the games have bo copyright owners any longer. They are literally abandoned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_by_...
Images, music, video, and text would all be under copyright, while characters and logos may be registered trademarks.
Oh yes, of course. I was talking about reverse engineering the code only. Requiring the official assets is a no-brainer.
Largely it is legal, but it's complicated. https://www.eff.org/issues/coders/reverse-engineering-faq
Somehow I’m not that concerned. I haven’t heard of any company but Nintendo trying to assert rights to 1980s game IP, and that’s because they’re still selling those literal ROMs as part of a subscription service.
Would I port such a game and then sell it? No, because that kind of puts a target on your back. Keeping it open source and also noncommercial, I don’t think it’s ever gonna matter.
(Obligatory I’m not a lawyer disclaimer - this is a vibes based comment not legal advice. Obviously copyright is nearly infinite, in theory)
It's not because they're selling ROMs, that only accounts for a small fraction of their back library.
It's because they're assholes.
Many of their franchises date back to that era and are incredibly valuable. It's like Disney caring about Steamboat Willey all those years.
No argument on the latter, but I feel like they also have a 'practical' concern that if they very openly ignored 8-bit and 16-bit 'piracy,' it's conceivable that devices like the Anbernic and Powkiddy ones (that already exist in our timeline) would get sold more in the open and be even easier to get started with. Maybe some parents (say, millennials who want our kids to learn the kind of gaming we grew up on) would rather buy those than a $349 Switch with the $10/month subscription they sell to the selection of 80s and 90s games in Switch Online.
In our timeline of course, those are already easy to get, but those companies cater to the kinds of nerds who flash a new OS to SD cards and download collections of ROMs.
Now, do I think Nintendo actually makes that much money on Switch Online from people who (A) are only there for the retro games and (B) would jump on some "more mainstream" and easier version of retro piracy handheld? Mehhhhhh not really. But someone probably espouses that viewpoint at Nintendo HQ.
You could do “clean room engineering” approach where the reversing agent generates a specification from its findings, and then have a separate agent reimplement the code without seeing the original binaries/code.
You’d just have to make sure the specification doesn’t include actual source snippets (the AI will try this if you don’t specify). Pseudo code would be sufficient I guess where necessary.
Unless you develop your AI agent from scratch or you clone a never-released game, it would be extremely easy for the rightholders to claim that both agents have most certainly ingested the binary during their training phase, since it's well known that the hyperscalers have pirated everything that could be pirated to train their LLMs. Which is why malus.sh is a parody, not a real service.
One should be honest about what one builds. The F-15 project does that: the aim is the reconstruction of the original game, down to the opcodes; on the other hands it requires the user to provide the original game assets.
Reality would disagree. If the models are large enough few legal consequences are to be expected because governments don’t want to lose out on AI investments. And in the US the industry owns the executive, legislative and well, thoughts and prayers.
This creates an interesting problem via the normative power of the present - only people willing to accept the erosion of copyright can partake in the AI economy and since the AI economy has become essentially all growth, money and power rapidly concentrates on these people.
There won’t be a legal reckoning because the regulatory capture is complete - these models are “national security level” too big to fail now.
> it would be extremely easy for the rightholders to claim that both agents have most certainly ingested the binary during their training phase
Ingested the binary?
> ingested the binary during their training phase
That's extremely unlikely. The pirating seems to have been of eBooks, which were first converted to text, losing graphics and such too.
That's my understanding anyway, from reading a few reports. :)
If they try to claim that then they need proof, right? Good luck getting that.
Just no, this isn't a thing at all.
Yeah, that approach makes the most sense.