alt Hacker NewsI'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?
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Many of the games have bo copyright owners any longer. They are literally abandoned.
Images, music, video, and text would all be under copyright, while characters and logos may be registered trademarks.
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)
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.
Worry about it when you get a C&D.