> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?

whoever owns the hardware

currently running 2x DGX Sparks and never thought to use a commercial model again

This about the risk of getting sued by parties with deep pockets. Antrophic is close to an IPO so that is definitely not the kind of attention they want.

I can see your point, but on the other hand it seems like the only alternatives are a blanket ban on reverse engineering or a blanket allowance. I probably don't have to make the case for the value of reverse engineering here, so the question is to what degree it can be abused and if they have the responsibility to stop it. I would argue companies do have an obligation to consider and mitigate abuse of their product, especially frontier technologies. Probably the best outcome will be some kind of balance of judgment by the company.

We're already knocking on the door of just clean-room recreating any game or experience in one shot. In such an environment, who really cares about reverse engineering old games?

I mean, from game company perspective, will they really care about their old games getting reverse engineered when their next big title can be clean-room recreated by anyone with the skill to write a sentence? Maybe creating a game similar to the next big release will be something that the AIs refuse to do next? Interesting times.

As an aspiring game developer myself, I guess reducing the accessibility of old games benefits me (but I don't like it)--and hey, if you can't get that old game to run, maybe we can vibe code for a weekend and make a new game that captures the same feeling.

It's the wrong approach, because the public demand to reverse engineer games (a pretty benign activity, for humans at least not corporations) is massive and a new subset of hackers who will release public jailbreaks that could be used for hacking which is more of a grey area

Ultimately, the person offering the service gets to decide what the service is.

If I want to make a knitting forum, im not going to feel bad about deleting posts about reverse engineering video games.

> Who decides what gets to be reverse engineered and what doesn't?

The service provider decides the terms and conditions, as long as they comply with the law. For example, Google decides whether pirated movies can be hosted on its cloud service, because it provides the cloud service. It's pretty clear.

In a pure capitalist system, competitors would emerge if the repressed service were genuinely in high demand and lawful. If it was not, then well, that's just how we regulate the world but this cannot be considered a case of one industry deciding the fate of another.

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