Take-of Two Interactive which owns the intellectual property of related games GTA III and GTA Vice City, filed a lawsuit against the project developers RE3 (which is developed a clone of GTA III and GTA VC resources created by reverse engineering).
Take-Two Interactive requires the defendant to stop distributing the source code of the RE3 draft and all accompanying materials, as well as provide a report on the number of product downloads that infringe the company's intellectual property and pay compensation to cover copyright infringement damages.
For the RE3 project, legal action is the worst case after unlocking their GitHub repository, as in February, Take-Two Interactive secured a repository lock and 232 forks from the GitHub RE3 project by filing a Rights Act (DMCA) violation complaint.
Unfortunately we have some breaking news to cover on. Rockstar's parent company Take-Two Interactive has filed a lawsuit against the folks behind the reverse engineering project for GTA3 and Vice City, also known as Re3.
Filing can be seen herehttps://t.co/MQaASogUGG
— GTA News? RockstarINTEL.com (@GTAonlineNews) September 3, 2021
The developers disagreed with Take-Two Interactive's arguments and filed a counterclaim, after which GitHub lifted the block, even though filing a counterclaim carried the risk that once Take-Two Interactive had exhausted its options For an amicable settlement, you could escalate the litigation.
RE3 developers believe that the code they have created is not governed by intellectual property rights laws, or falls into the category of fair use (fair use), which allows the creation of compatible functional analogues, since the project is developed on the basis of reverse engineering and only the source code created by the collaborators is hosted in the repository of the project. The object files on the basis of which the game's functionality was recreated were not placed in the repository.
Fair use is also evidenced by the non-commercial nature of the project, whose main purpose is not to distribute unlicensed copies of someone else's intellectual property, but to give fans the opportunity to continue playing old versions of GTA, fix bugs and guarantee work on new platforms.
According to the authors of RE3, their project does not harm Take-Two Interactive, but stimulates demand and contributes to the growth of original game sales, as using the RE3 code requires the user to have resources from the original game.
According to demand presented by Take-Two Interactive, files placed in the repository contain not only source code derivative that allows you to run the game without the presence of the original executable files, they also include components from the original games, such as text, character dialogues, and some in-game resources.
The repository also contains links to full re3 install builds, which, given the availability of resources from the original game, allow you to fully recreate the game, which, with the exception of certain little things, is no different from the original games.
Take-Two Interactive has the exclusive rights to reproduce, publicly perform, distribute, display and adapt GTA III and GTA VC.
According to the plaintiff, when copying, adapting and distributing the code and associated resources to these games, the developers deliberately violated Take-Two Interactive's intellectual property and they should compensate for the damage done (users are supposed to download a free equivalent instead of buying the original games).
It is proposed to determine the exact amount of the compensation in court, but 150 thousand dollars + legal costs are noted as one of the options. The defendants are promoters Angelo Papenhoff (aap), Theo Morra, Eray Orçunus and Adrian Graber.
The re3 project reverse-engineered the source code for GTA III and GTA Vice City, released about 20 years ago. The published code was ready to build a fully functional game, using files with game assets, which he set out to extract from his licensed copy of GTA III.
The code recovery project was launched in 2018 with the aim of fixing some bugs, expanding opportunities for mod developers, and conducting experiments to study and replace algorithms to simulate physical processes.
In particular, RE3 was ported to Linux, FreeBSD and ARM systems, OpenGL support was added, audio output was provided via OpenAL, additional tools were added for debugging, a rotating camera was implemented, XInput support was added , peripheral support expanded,