The people behind the re3 and revc open source projects are resisting the lawsuit brought by Take-Two Interactive against them. Take-Two believes the projects infringe copyright in GTA III and GTA Vice City, but its makers deny this.

Project use according to makers It is not owned by Rockstar, which will not infringe copyright. The designers claim that only the gaming machine code is reverse engineered. The group argues that the project was intended to add additions to the game’s code, not just copy it. Therefore, the project will be transformative and falls under fair use.

Re3 and revc are built backwards on the source code of GTA III and GTA Vice City respectively. This made the games playable on consoles that were not originally released, such as the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita. The project was also aimed at improving and adapting the games. Loading times have been shortened, among other things, and games have received support for wider screens. Since it was an open source project, the entire source code was publicly available on GitHub.

Take-Two Meldde in his indictment That the project “deliberately and maliciously” copies, adapts and distributes the source code and “other content”. Therefore, the company demanded compensation that must be determined during the lawsuit. Alternatively, the group can also pay $150,000 for each act violated. The company further demanded that depositors hand over all of their materials and that the source code be removed offline.

The project was implemented by a Copyright request Under DMCA from GitHub. The makers have already written that they disagree with Take-Two’s argument, and have submitted a request to GitHub to bring the project back online. Since Take-Two did not respond in time, it was temporarily successful, even the game company DMCA request Presenter.