
EVE Online submits DMCA takedown to GitHub - cygwin98
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2011-05-24-cpp-virtual-world-operations.markdown
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jameskilton
Frankly I would say that CCP is fully in the right here. This person created
an account with the name "eveonline" thus pretending to be CCP. While
decompiling/reverse engineering is not in itself illegal, falsifying an
identity like this is sure shady and should be shut down.

~~~
ugh
_Publishing_ decompiled source code (of copyrighted works) is a clear
violation of copyright law. The problem is not the reverse engineering or
decompiling, the problem is also not the name (that might be illegal, too, but
it wasn’t complained about), the problem is that copyrighted works were
_published._

Copyright law doesn’t really care about what you do with copyrighted works as
long as you don’t make what you did public.

~~~
jeffreyg
> Copyright law doesn’t really care about what you do with copyrighted works
> as long as you don’t make what you did public.

My understanding of the DMCA is that if there's any copyright access control
(DRM, etc.), you're not allowed to attempt to circumvent that protection
mechanism. Not even recreationally, privately..

~~~
ugh
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2584617>

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raganwald
I write program "A," which I copyright. Somebody translates A into
representation "B," which is functionally identical to A, without being
literally identical. This seems parallel to the following case:

I write a blog in English. Somebody translates my words to Russian, creating a
document that is semantically identical to my words.

Copyright seems to apply here in a most appropriate way.

~~~
seabee
I think your analogy is wrong. Copyrights apply to creative processes, which
the translation from English to Russian would surely involve, or a hand-
written port from one language/API to another. A machine translation from
computer language A to B would not apply, since it is the work of a tool, not
a human.

~~~
raganwald
Are you saying that if I write a blog post and you translate it into Russian,
I do not have a copyright over your translation of my blog post?

~~~
pasiaj
No. He's saying if you design a program that takes an input A of witch it
creates the output B, you do not own the copyright to all programs that can
create B out of A.

~~~
raganwald
Really? The word "translation" describes the output of a translator, not the
translator itself. I don't think either of us are talking about copyrighting
decompilers.

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ovi256
That's a takedown request for the decompiled Python code of the Eve client.
Python is about 60% of client code, and easily decompiled. Publishing that is
not really an extreme act of technical prowess.

Interestingly, Eve uses Stackless Python for much of the network multiplayer
engine.

~~~
tibbon
I had no idea that any such game has so much Python code. I was under the
impression that Python (and Ruby) were too slow for most game stuff. very
cool.

~~~
lutorm
The UI for Civ 4 is in python. You can modify it to your hearts' content. (I
hacked it to communicate with Dragon NaturallySpeaking so the UI would be
voice accessible.)

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pharno
first of all: 19 hours ago, and the repository is still online?

second: I think it should be pretty easy to decompile .pyc files yourself. An
other way would be to provide a decompile script. There are allways
possibilities to decompile something.

~~~
wladimir
Right, but putting a generic Python decompile script on github would be legal.
Uploading CCP's copyrighted code is not.

This is one of the rare cases in which DMCA request makes perfect sense.

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ary
Never noticed the Github 404 page until now. Clever.

<https://github.com/eveonline/eveonline>

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omouse
That's dumb, why do they care so much about copyright? I was going to re-new
my subscription but I'm not sure I will. Are there any good open source space
games that accept donations?

~~~
brockf
I advocate for a lot of intellectual and software freedoms, but abolishing
copyright and _all_ intellectual property concerns (of which this one is
entirely valid) seems a bit ludicrous.

~~~
omouse
Why does it seem ludicrous? Copyright and "intellectual property" have created
more problems than they have solved.

