'GTA' Modding Group Doesn't Fold, Fights Back In Court Against Take-Two, Rockstar

'GTA' Modding Group Doesn't Fold, Fights Back In Court Against Take-Two, Rockstar

3 years ago
Anonymous $FNmJglWnLu

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211118/12084347968/gta-modding-group-doesnt-fold-fights-back-court-against-take-two-rockstar.shtml

We've been talking a great deal about Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games lately as it relates to their aggressive actions on modding communities for the Grand Theft Auto series. This new war on modders really kicked off over the summer, with the companies looking to shut down a bunch of mods that mostly brought old GTA content into newer games for retro fans. Then came one modding group managing to reverse engineer the game to create its own version of the source code, which it posted on GitHub. Rockstar DMCA'd that project, but at least one modder managed to get GitHub to put it back up. That project was called "GTA RE3" and was supposed to be the basis to let other modders do all sorts of interesting things with the game from a modding standpoint, or to forklift the game onto platforms it wasn't designed for, say on a Nintendo console. Take-Two and Rockstar then cried "Piracy!" and filed a lawsuit.

That's typically where the story would end. The modding group would hide or run away if they could, or they would settle the suit for fear of a long and protracted legal process. But that doesn't appear to be the case here, as the four men behind RE3 have responded to the suit, denying all accusations and asserting fair use. The response from the modder's attorneys is embedded below, but mostly consists of outright one-sentence denials or assertions that the claims in the suit aren't such that they have enough knowledge to affirm or deny them, and therefore deny them. But there are also some nuggets in there that tease out what the defense would be if this thing proceeds.

Last Seen
45 minutes ago
Reputation
0
Spam
0.000
Last Seen
10 minutes ago
Reputation
0
Spam
0.000
Last Seen
31 minutes ago
Reputation
0
Spam
0.000
Last Seen
2 hours ago
Reputation
0
Spam
0.000
Last Seen
27 minutes ago
Reputation
0
Spam
0.000
Last Seen
29 minutes ago
Reputation
0
Spam
0.000