You are definitely right in the case of clean room rewrites that basically achieve the same behavior independently (at least it can be argued they didnt just rewrite the original decompile code ig).
What I see people doing now is give Claude a game binary and ask it to reverse engineer and rewrite the game. I’m not a lawyer but I don’t think that can be redistributed legally, it’s basically a transformation of the original game even if the final product doesn’t contain any original assets. And I also saw a guy that did this to port some skating game to pc, and he said he believes all games will be open source in a few years. Not sure how he meant it, but it doesn’t make sense to me in any way, being able to reverse engineer or decompile a product was never an issue in making something open source, it’s an issue of copyright or licensing.
You are definitely right in the case of clean room rewrites that basically achieve the same behavior independently (at least it can be argued they didnt just rewrite the original decompile code ig).
What I see people doing now is give Claude a game binary and ask it to reverse engineer and rewrite the game. I’m not a lawyer but I don’t think that can be redistributed legally, it’s basically a transformation of the original game even if the final product doesn’t contain any original assets. And I also saw a guy that did this to port some skating game to pc, and he said he believes all games will be open source in a few years. Not sure how he meant it, but it doesn’t make sense to me in any way, being able to reverse engineer or decompile a product was never an issue in making something open source, it’s an issue of copyright or licensing.