How long until this is DMCA'd? How has the project it's based on stuck around for so long? Do I perhaps misunderstand what this is? https://github.com/pret/pokeemerald
Copyright being as long as it is is a theft of our culture. I (and many of our generation) grew up with Pokemon, it's a common experience for many of us. A classic of our culture. Except we're not allowed to use it, remix it, build our own versions, etc. We still do, of course, but it's all illegal.
It didn't used to be this way.
I think 20-30 years of copyright should be plenty to extract whatever profits you deserve from the fruits of your labor. Anything beyond that is just holding culture hostage for the benefit of a few. It doesn't serve society in any meaningful way.
It's a port of a disassembly that requires you to provide your own ROM. The legality of such things is a tangled web that anyone producing them needs to navigate very, very carefully.
It's mostly argued around or against the application of fair use. I suggest consulting a lawyer if you're truly interested, as it quickly gets into legalese around what constitutes ownership, distribution, etc. Throw in a lack of extensive case law and you quickly get into opinions rather than legal bases.
I get the sense that these disassembly/decompilation projects believe that some types of IP-laden asset data can be shipped embedded into the project — not necessarily "legally", but in that they'll likely get away with doing so indefinitely — as long as:
1. those assets are stored in proprietary formats that only the game code itself understands, and
2. no tool exists in the project to extract the assets from these proprietary formats into open formats, unless that tool itself exists only in source-code form in the codebase, and requires the ROM as an input to compile it (even if in the case of such a tool, the ROM is doing nothing but serving as a "key" to unlock compilation.)
Basically, if you have to prove you have your own copy of the IP in order to make their embedded copy of the IP "legible", then it's very hard to construct an evidence-based DMCA takedown order that actually makes any coherent point about the project "distributing" said IP.
That being said, shipping assets like this at all, even if you "can get away with it", is ultimately just a kind of laziness / shortcut-taking. They do it because there's either no clear/simple/obvious way to automatically extract the given asset data from the ROM (e.g. because the relevant data is split up into various data planes + metadata bits that are stored "exploded" all over the ROM), so they just did it once by hand, committing the results; or because there's no clear/simple/obvious way to store the extracted asset data such that a regular compiler/assembler natively understands how to embed it into the binary in the particular form it was found in the original ROM. (Remember, re-assembling/compiling to the original ROM is always the test these projects use to ensure their disassembly/decompilation is preserving semantics. So they need to replicate every weird layout quirk the original dev tooling imposed upon the original ROM. And sometimes the original dev tooling included special-purpose domain-specific asset-codegen tools that aren't part of regular compiler toolchains.)
What these projects should actually be doing, is taking on the schlep: writing the extract tooling anyway, even if it's just "copy these bytes from here and these bytes from there, and spit them out as hex in an .asm file with this header"; and/or writing matching asset-codegen tooling to the tooling that likely existed in the platform SDK, to run before compile/assemble time, converting the extracted ROM asset files into a form (probably a bunch of little assembly files) that will land in the right places when linked back together to form the original ROM.
And, to be clear, they mostly do do this! These projects are very good at doing this!
But sometimes — especially on a larger project with many contributors — one or two things like this aren't audited properly, and fall through the cracks. Or they start out as temporary "bootstrap" approaches made during a private phase of development to get things working + compiling to a correct image; and then not all of those get cleaned up before the repo gets made public.
Perhaps I'm mistaken but the project doesn't need a copy of the original ROM at all right?
To be clear; I don't really understand the law around this - my own country is based on case law which means that even if I wanted to open source some of my reverse engineered games (I have a few private partial implementations of some old defunct game engines in-progress), the distinct lack of prior cases means, sadly, it's prudent not to release them at all while the companies are still active.
Well, the decomp requires you to provide your own ROM, and doesn't include any of the assets from the original game. So, that's probably okay for the most part.
This browser based version on the other hand, is in far murkier territory. The fact you don't need a ROM means the assets are definitely included by default on this site, and Nintendo would have a way better case for getting it taken down.
It's basically equivalent to those ROM sites that let you play GBA ROMs in the browser through an emulator written in JavaScript or WebAssembly.
But Nintendo's lawyers pay a lot less attention to anything prior to the Switch generation, and the same presumably goes for the Pokemon Company ones. If this project gets a lot of media coverage it's probably toast, but if it's mostly discussed on the odd programming forum like this one, it could survive a very long time.
I get nervous releasing just symbols for a game and here is a full disassembly. I have no idea how tolerant the rights holders are to this kind of stuff. I guess you just roll the dice, but the power is in their hands how far they take action.
I’m of the opinion that projects like this should start hosting Forgejo instances in countries with favorable laws and just mirroring to Github for exposure.
Notably radicle is reportedly compatible with seed nodes that bridge between (ie are simultaneously available on) clearnet and overlays such as tor. (I haven't personally tested this just repeated what I read elsewhere.)
But he then writes: "I want to be really clear that this is the schematic maximally cynical approach, is not what SpaceX is doing, and is not actually possible."
"Danish pension company Akademikir Pension has announced it will divest from Tesla due to ongoing concerns about labour rights, corporate governance, and Tesla CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk's behaviour."
> not entirely sure what this one is... another variation of "Define Space" ? check back for the correct definition of this
It's probably 'displacement'. This worked together with ORG ('origin'). ORG specifies where in memory the code will run. DSP then moves the code the specified amount further along in memory, with the understanding that it will be moved back to the ORG address when it needs to run.
> DFC
> not entirely sure what this one is... define characters?
Same as DFM, but generates PETSCII instead of ASCII.
"While the cross-stock mean buy-and-hold return is over 30,000%, the median is -6.9%. Shareholders' wealth was enhanced by $91 trillion over the century, but long-term investors in nearly 60% of stocks incurred wealth reductions"
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