HACKER Q&A
📣 luckbunny

Legal protect on a game reverse engineering project


Hello. I want to build an open-source emulator for the server for an online game. I know that there are a lot of them, but I would like to avoid having legal issues on it (such as a DMCA takedown).

For example, roBrowser was running for many years, and its GitHub repository received a DMCA takedown. Despite it recovered later, it's annonying.

Does someone can recommened legal actions (or lawyers) to help me to avoid any kind of issues on this project?


  👤 simne Accepted Answer ✓
Exists exclusion, when You could benefit using aggressive legal policy.

If You are really big corporation, You could surround niche of game with Your own copyrighted content and patents, like CPU vendors, each have hundreds of patents.

In this case, owner of game, will risk to begin great legal war if he tries to sue You.

But this is race of arms, very like Cold war. To be safe, Your investments should be big enough, to compete with what have owner of game.

For example, to compete with Microsoft, You should spend hundreds of millions for copyrighted content and patents, but if Your competitor smaller, may be enough few tens of patents.


👤 regularjack
My suggestion would be to build it first, and worry about legal issues when/if they actually happen.

Maybe you'll build it and it will attract no attention. Or you'll get bored with the project and drop it. Or a myriad of other reasons that will result in the project not seeing adoption.

Legal issues likely will only happen if the project sees adoption. I would focus my energy on making it being adopted first, instead of fixing legal issues that might never materialize.


👤 simne
You don't really need lawyers, because they will not protect You in this case.

Things are really pretty simple - just exists things which are copyrighted and prohibited to reverse, and which are not.

If You will NOT include in rep prohibited things, You are safe without any lawyer. But if You include, You are unsafe, with ANY lawyer.

Ask questions, I'll try answer.