Developer Fights GTA DMCA Claim and Wins

Ethan James 10 May 2021

Earlier this year’s classic GTA fans reverse engineered GTA III and GTA: Vice City source codes. They submitted the source code online, but Rockstart blocked it via a DMCA claim almost immediately. The whole thing could end up like this, but one of the fan developers stood up to Rockstar and made them put the source code back online. 

What does it mean for the industry?  Well, it opens a whole new horizon for modders and developers who can now mod and port both titles to new platforms and add platform-specific features. Something like this happened to Super Mario 64 in 2020. 

When Take-Two made GitHub remove the source code from the platform because “ it contained copyrighted materials owned by Take-Two,” a New Zeland-based developer Theo filed hit his own counter-notice. As a result, GitHub restored his full fork that contains the original reverse-engineered code. As Theo explains, he managed to prove to GitHub, that the code was 100% original and didn’t include any copyrighted data by Take-Two. The counter-notice was successful. However, only Theo’s fork was restored, while over 200 more forks with the code were removed forever. Do you think GitHub should restore the rest of the forks as well or this problem requires direct inquiries from fork owners? Share the news and join the chat in the comments below.