I struggle to understand what legal leverage they used to threaten him to remove every detail about the game. Can someone post the game name and company name?

So, if you reverse-engineer game X and post reverse-engineered code, what exactly do you infringe, how and in which jurisdiction? What changes if it is done via LLM?

(I understand that LLM decompilation is absolutely out of hand right now and something surely will come to trample the fun. But what and when? I suppose american LLMs will have their system prompt updated to forbid any reversing help and report suspicious activity straight to legal hotline)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) (from a previous version of the page)

>what legal leverage

PIF owns EA, when they invite you to a meeting you might start to worry about foil lined room and carpentry tools lying around

> So, if you reverse-engineer game X and post reverse-engineered code, what exactly do you infringe, how and in which jurisdiction? What changes if it is done via LLM?

In 1986 there was a federal court case, Whelan Associates Inc. v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory, in which it was ruled that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of a computer program was protected by copyright, and thus independently produced software could be found infringing if it copied these elements, even if the code were not copied (or mechanically translated) verbatim. This led to a six-year period in which computer software enjoyed generous copyright protection, such that "clones" of copyrighted software were effectively infringing. It wouldn't be until the early nineties that other court rulings would tighten the rules again, notably Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai Inc.. The 3-step "abstraction-filtration-comparison" test has been used by most courts since 1992 to determine whether nonliteral parts of program code are eligible for copyright protection, and whether another, independently written program is infringing.

HOWEVER, the Whelan standard was never actually overturned or stricken from U.S. law due to legislation or litigation! And companies have sued and won under the Whelan standard! Most notably, Oracle in their copyright and patent case against Google regarding Java APIs in Android. Google ultimately prevailed, but only because the Supreme Court ruled that Google's use of the APIs was fair use; they did not overturn the Federal Circuit's finding that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of the Java declaration code was ineligible for copyright! And I doubt that the Supreme Court would similarly smile on a reverse-engineered complete video game!

I believe that these reverse-engineered projects infringe copyright, under the Whelan standard and perhaps under the stricter Altai standard as well. You do not get a free pass because the original code was in C and yours is in Rust; or because you created a slightly different version of each function in the original code.