GTA III and VC members of reverse engineer projects challenge Take-Two lawsuit – Gaming – News

The people behind the open source projects re3 and revc are fighting the lawsuit that Take-Two Interactive has launched against them. Take-Two believes the projects infringe copyrights on GTA III and GTA Vice City, but the makers deny that.

Using the projects according to the makers not owned by Rockstar, which would not infringe copyright. The modders claim that only the games machine code is reverse engineered. The group argues that the project was intended to make additions to the game code, not simply copy it. Therefore, the project would be transformative and fall under fair use.

Re3 and revc reverse engineered the source code of GTA III and GTA Vice City respectively. This made the games playable on consoles they were not originally released on, such as the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita. The project was also aimed at improving and adapting the games. Load times were shortened, among other things, and the games received support for wider monitors. Since it was an open source project, the entire source code was publicly available on GitHub.

Take-Two meldde in his indictment that the project “deliberately and maliciously” copies, adapts and distributes the source code and “other content”. Therefore, the company demanded compensation, which must be determined during a lawsuit. Alternatively, the group could also pay $150,000 per work infringed. The company further demanded that the modders hand over all their material and that the source code be taken offline.

The project was carried out through a copyright request under DMCA legislation from GitHub. The makers already wrote that they did not agree with Take-Two’s argumentation, and made a request on GitHub to put the project back online. Since Take-Two did not respond in time, it was temporarily successful, until the game company another DMCA request submitted.

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