Copyright status of binaries in dolphin (for debian)

[Shonumi]

Are you talking about this? That's the first version of the free DSP ROM replacements created by LM1234. It was notable for only working with Zelda ucode games, but it was the first attempt at RE'ing the DSP's IROM. Unless you mean something else?

[RachelB]

No, https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/3.5/docs/DSP/DSP_UC_ROM.txt

[Shonumi]

That's just a disassembly of the DSP ROM, part of the reverse engineering process. In order to ascertain how the DSP worked on a deeper level, they had to disassemble the dumped ROM. Disassemblies and documentation like that aren't an infringement of copyright under US law at the very least, if you can prove that it was necessary to develop compatible software. It falls under Fair Use over here, and several game companies have lost in court fighting against this principle. The US isn't the world, however, they tend to set the global stage for copyright issues (money and influence and all that fun stuff). Anyway, the files in question seem to have been removed because they were no longer necessary, rather than an issue of copyright; that's what the commit history suggests anyway.

[flacs]

I'm currently looking into the font files. The format is only partially documented but libogc fully implements SYS_InitFont() which is the SDK function that decompresses the files from the IPL ROM. It should be fairly easy to write a font encoder that reverses this process. Then we could take any similar-looking open source font and encode it into the required format. I doubt games are picky enough to checksum the font data and for those that do we could make game-specific Action Replay Codes.

TL;DR: The font problem can be solved with some effort.

[RachelB]

(10-26-2014, 03:46 AM)Shonumi Wrote: That's just a disassembly of the DSP ROM, part of the reverse engineering process. In order to ascertain how the DSP worked on a deeper level, they had to disassemble the dumped ROM. Disassemblies and documentation like that aren't an infringement of copyright under US law at the very least, if you can prove that it was necessary to develop compatible software. It falls under Fair Use over here, and several game companies have lost in court fighting against this principle. The US isn't the world, however, they tend to set the global stage for copyright issues (money and influence and all that fun stuff). Anyway, the files in question seem to have been removed because they were no longer necessary, rather than an issue of copyright; that's what the commit history suggests anyway.

No. It's literally just the dsp rom in text form with a few comments added in. You could easily turn it back into the original rom. Changing the format doesn't make it legal. You are free to disassemble it yourself and use that for RE purposes, but you cannot distribute it the rom, assembled or not. Hence why those files have been removed from the repo.

[Shonumi]

Go ask delroth why he removed them. He specifically wrote that it was due to the documentation being outdated. The disassembly is the entire ROM written as the DSP's instructions, but you are still free to do that under US law. There's no restriction about what form the disassembly has to be in or how well commented it has to be, so long as the purpose of that is to document how the software works for the purpose of making your own software compatible. Unless the Dolphin devs had an ulterior motive, it fits the bill for RE work.

There are plenty of other disassemblies out there that do the exact same thing, and yes they also include enough parseable code to conceivably recreate the source file. And those are still legal.

[RachelB]

No need to ask, i remember why: Because they are illegal.

Quote:but you are still free to do that under US law.

No, you are not free to distribute copyrighted code without permission, no matter what form it is in. It is no different than distributing the original roms that produced it.

Quote:There are plenty of other disassemblies out there that do the exact same thing, and yes they also include enough parseable code to conceivably recreate the source file. And those are still legal.

They are legal to have and use, but they are not legal to distribute.

[Shonumi]

RachelB Wrote:No need to ask, i remember why: Because they are illegal.

Delroth explicitly wrote he removed them because they were outdated: see here. If there is another reason, please provide some proof.

RachelB Wrote:No, you are not free to distribute copyrighted code without permission, no matter what form it is in. It is no different than distributing the original roms that produced it.

That's not what the US courts have said. I'm going to have to take their word over yours. If you're disassembling something for the purpose of reverse engineering it, you're free to document how that code works and share it with others. By the very nature of disassembly, you're going to be creating a transformative work of the original copyrighted item in question, no matter if you're just printing the individual assembly instructions, the binary code, or the mnemonics used by a compiler. The courts have recognized this as an issue and have covered it under Fair Use. There are no restrictions about sharing the disassemblies, so long as the purpose of the sharing falls under Fair Use. Distributing the DSP disassemblies with the intent of covertly allowing people to recreate the DSP ROMs is not an act covered under Fair Use and would be illegal; having it available for other devs to study on their own is Fair Use and legal.

RachelB Wrote:They are legal to have and use, but they are not legal to distribute.

Go tell that to Github or ROMHacking.net then, or various Wikis aimed at console dev. I'm sure they'll remove them with all due haste.

[RachelB]

Jan 27 15:07:59 <@delroth> that shouldn't matter
Jan 27 15:08:23 <@delroth> we provide a lot of valid reason for nintendo to kill any Dolphin build anyway...
Jan 27 15:08:31 <@delroth> reasons*
Jan 27 15:09:04 <@no_cluez> mhm like what?
Jan 27 15:09:24 <@delroth> no_cluez: dunno, the fact that we distribute the DSP ROM in our source tarballs?
Jan 27 15:09:31 <@delroth> the use of several nintendo trademarks?
Jan 27 15:09:38 <@no_cluez> w00t, which dsp rom
Jan 27 15:10:03 <@delroth> no_cluez: docs/DSP/DSP_UC_ROM.txt
Jan 27 15:10:57 <@delroth> anyway, some stuff in our code directly comes from Nintendo's SDKs too

He used that commit message to avoid drawing attention to it, afaik.

[Shonumi]

That's all I wanted to hear then. That doesn't change the legal status of the files however.