Youtube comment by Coda Highland 4 days ago
"Sadly, there's a misunderstanding of the legal situation here. The reverse engineering exemption only applies to the people doing the research. The code you write as a result of the process is still a derivative work of the original version, so you don't have the right to make additional copies of that in order to distribute it. It's like translating a book into Spanish and then distributing that -- that's still copyright infringement. What makes it even more clear-cut that it's still a copy is that you can recreate the original by compiling it. It's just a copy of the same thing represented in a different form.
The reverse engineering exemption WOULD allow fragments of this decompilation to be shared. Individual functions are generally considered uncopyrightable, as they are just a description of a process, which would have to be patented instead of copyrighted. However, the arrangement of uncopyrightable pieces can create a copyrightable work -- after all, you can't copyright words, but you can copyright a book. So again, that exemption doesn't apply.
(As a side note, this isn't a clean-room reimplementation. A clean-room reimplementation means that one group of programmers writes documentation explaining how the code works, and another group of programmers uses that as a specification to recreate it. These programmers definitely had their eyes on the binary while writing the decompiled version.)"
The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time has been FULLY decompiled | MVG
