After landing on the receiving end of a lawsuit from game publishing giant Take-Two Interactive, a group of modders has decided to fight it out with the company in court. The modders were originally sued for their project, Re3, which reverse-engineered the source code for GTA III and GTA: Vice City, allowing the games to run on Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Vita.
The modding group, however, is denying accusations of copyright infringement from Take-Two, stating that they “deny that Plaintiff is entitled to any of the relief sought in its prayer for relief. Defendants respectfully request that the Court enter judgment in their favor and against Plaintiff, denying Plaintiff all relief sought herein.”
Take-Two has claimed that the modding group’s reverse engineering and distribution of Re3 “has caused, and is continuing to cause, irreparable harm to Take-Two.” Through the lawsuit, Take-Two is seeking “damages, and injunctive and other equitable relief against Defendants and those working in concert with them.”
However, the modding group’s denial hinges on its argument that Re3 doesn’t actually contain any Rockstar-created assets. Instead, the mod simply contains functional reverse-engineered versions of GTA III and Vice City’s machine code, which the group argues, falls under fair use.
It’s worth noting that Take-Two wouldn’t have wanted anyone to be able to play either of these games on Switch when the lawsuit was originally filed this past September. Just two months later, the company published Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition, which includes playable versions of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas for the Nintendo Switch.
However, that game has also been targeted by modders recently, although not to get the game running on unintended hardware. Instead, modders have been hard at work fixing the GTA Trilogy’s myriad of issues, from graphical bugs to typos.
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