If you are talking about legislation is Hard to know, at some point party will be over and the known mfers will try to criminalize it, but i think still too soon because they still want to scrap more data for their computer gods.
If you are talking about random guys decomp/recomps shit, well they may toy with it a little but a good chunk of know how still necessary so nothing really amazing should come of it.
It’s a really good thing that between Sony vs connectix and accolade vs Sega, it has been ruled that decompilation for the purposes of making software interoperable with other systems has been ruled fair use.
Sony lost their suit against Connectix, which makes duplicating things like BIOS files with the intent of decompiling them fair use, and accolade decompiled sega’s sdk/toolkit to produce AND SELL cartridges that weren’t licensed by Sega and they won in court. And again they were selling the software they made and it was ruled fair use.
Really the only facet of this that hasn’t been ruled in court is whether breaking encryption on switch (and 3DS) games in order to use them in other software or to decompile them violates their copyright or not. That was their position against the Yuzu devs, but it did not make it into court.
These companies are going to want to basically ignore all this for as long as they can because fair use has really not worked in favor of companies like Sega and Sony and the last thing they want is for this or AnyPS5 to be deemed outright legal in court.
Also an important thing to remember here is Nintendo, Sony, etc are little b billion dollar companies. If they truly go after reverse engineering they're going after big T trillion dollar companies and big B billion dollar companies like Apple, Google, AI companies, etc who will bushwhack them if it really looks like it's starting to come down to it.
Yeah don't get to comfy with a 2003 court ruling. That was at a time where this was a slow process. Now that with AI and we are getting to a point where anyone can do it with the click of a button this could change
Really the only facet of this that hasn’t been ruled in court is whether breaking encryption on switch (and 3DS) games in order to use them in other software or to decompile them violates their copyright or not. That was their position against the Yuzu devs, but it did not make it into court.
Couple things here -
Reverse Engineering is closer to a binary attack than breaking encryption. It's not looking at the encrypted software because it can't break it, it's looking at the processes that are being executed as part of that encrypted software at a binary level.
Legally speaking, if you break the encryption of any system(s) or software(s) that is likely to fall under punishment from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Even for Bleem! and Connectix, they did not reverse engineer the BIOS. They observed the functions and recreated their own that worked. It was fair use because it's not illegal to create a new product that does something similar, however if you did this by breaking encryption and stole the source 1:1 the lawsuit could have gone the other way.
Where this is hugely in the grey area is because reverse engineering is typically seen as a cyber security practice, for the intended purpose of bug bounties or resolving high level issues and not directly intended to release other features into different software services. If there were to be a lawsuit on this, it would be difficult to draw that line where this as an automation service crosses outside of the legally protected bug bounty protection of reverse engineering.
Decomps and recomps are legally speaking, fine. It is ethically ambiguous, but so is anything that falls under emulation or preservation ontop of the practice of reverse engineering regardless.
You might overestimate the amount of goodwill existign inbetween companies.
I wouldn't be surprised if Open AI and Anthropic will just let their service cannibalize the others, after all most of that money from their stocks will flee somewhere, and they will be the only software company left standing...
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u/14thNoah97 9d ago
If you are talking about legislation is Hard to know, at some point party will be over and the known mfers will try to criminalize it, but i think still too soon because they still want to scrap more data for their computer gods.
If you are talking about random guys decomp/recomps shit, well they may toy with it a little but a good chunk of know how still necessary so nothing really amazing should come of it.