> It's impossible to use freshly decompiled code for any purpose
But it is not useless, otherwise you wouldn't decompile it in the first place. Creating a reinterpretation of software without looking at the decompiled code is fine, that's what OpenMW or Wine do.
> The musical equivalent would be to create a music sounding similarly
That's a parody or homage though. And still not the same, I'd argue cover songs are reinterpretations. Say I do a Jazz cover of a theme from Mario.
> But the goals of music reproduction is to reproduce the original artwork, in case of a decompilation it's an explicit non-goal as it's impossible anyways.
If my goal is to make a movie, and I "decompile" a movie into a script, that won't perfectly match the original script. I'd have to add my own stage directions, set descriptions, etc. And of course the original film never 100% matches the original script. Is that movie now somehow not Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?
> But it is not impossible to use it, otherwise you wouldn't need it. Creating a reinterpretation of software without looking at the decompiled code is fine, that's what OpenMW or Wine do.
Sure that's also possible, that's also what librw (Renderware engine) has done here for GTA3 and Vice city, only the game code itself was decompiled, not the game engine.
But then again, it's not because you use the binary that it makes it a derivative of the original source code. The conversion of source code to binary loses tons of information, it's a destructive process.
> If I "decompile" a movie into a script, that won't perfectly match the original script. I'd have to add my own stage directions, set descriptions, etc. And of course the film never 100% matches the original script. Is that script now somehow not Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?
But it is not useless, otherwise you wouldn't decompile it in the first place. Creating a reinterpretation of software without looking at the decompiled code is fine, that's what OpenMW or Wine do.
> The musical equivalent would be to create a music sounding similarly
That's a parody or homage though. And still not the same, I'd argue cover songs are reinterpretations. Say I do a Jazz cover of a theme from Mario.
> But the goals of music reproduction is to reproduce the original artwork, in case of a decompilation it's an explicit non-goal as it's impossible anyways.
If my goal is to make a movie, and I "decompile" a movie into a script, that won't perfectly match the original script. I'd have to add my own stage directions, set descriptions, etc. And of course the original film never 100% matches the original script. Is that movie now somehow not Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?