Your own copy and the law
This chapter summarises the law in 35 countries. It is not legal advice. The law of the country where you live applies to you, wherever the code is hosted. A lawyer who knows software law in your country can advise on a project. For the rules every project follows, read Legal.
Owning and sharing a game
Most countries let a person who owns a game study how it works. No country lets that person share the game. Every project made with GameFrame starts from a copy that the person owns. Where the game is still sold, the person can buy it from the store. GameFrame never links to download sites for games.
Three groups of countries
Most countries follow one of three patterns.
| Group | What it allows | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| The EU model | Observing, studying and testing a program you own. Decompiling only to make an independent program work with it | The EU, the UK, South Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Ukraine, Norway, and partly India |
| The US trade-agreement model | The same study rights, with a strict ban on breaking locks and a closed list of exceptions that includes interoperability | The US, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Australia |
| Back-up and research only | A back-up copy, sometimes a research copy. No express permission to decompile | Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the UAE, South Africa under its current Act |
Observing a program while it runs is the widest permission. It covers running the original, capturing frames and state, and recording calls. These are the playbook's observe and emulate steps (re-observe, re-emulate). Decompiling is the narrowest permission. Many countries allow it only for interoperability, and about a third of the countries covered give it no express cover. Of the playbook's steps, decompiling has the least legal cover.
GameFrame's defaults
GameFrame's defaults are based on these laws. The user decides what their own project does (The user decides).
- Sharing. No country covered allows sharing game files, assets or decompiled code. Every decompilation exception also forbids passing the information on.
- New code. Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey and the EU forbid using decompiled information to make a "substantially similar" program. A reimplementation that behaves like the original and uses its own new code has the lowest risk under these rules (Writing findings).
- Locks. Lock rules differ more between countries than any other point. Japan has no known interoperability exception to its lock rules. Thailand removed its exceptions in 2022. Mexico makes circumvention for profit a crime. Australia's Federal Court held in 2024 that a game's online checks count as locks. Where a game's files are encrypted or protected, the regional pages say what is known for each country.
- Services. South Korea fines people who run private servers, even for a single-player game. Japan has arrested people who sold edited save files.
"Abandonware"
A game stays under copyright when its maker stops selling it. Copyright lasts at least the author's life plus 50 years in every country covered. No commercial game from the 1970s onward is out of copyright anywhere. ScummVM's FAQ says the word "is not a proper legal concept in any country" (ScummVM FAQ). Sharing an out-of-print game is still unlawful.
Hosting
GitHub applies the US takedown process (the DMCA) to every repository, wherever its owner lives (GitHub DMCA policy). The law of your own country still applies to your work. A project that holds only its own new code and documents contains no game material for a rights holder to take down.
Past takedowns
- Nintendo removed builds of the Super Mario 64 PC port that included the game's assets.
- Take-Two removed the re3 and reVC projects for GTA III and Vice City in February 2021 (GitHub DMCA notice), then sued their authors. Those projects needed the player's own data. Their code came from a decompilation of the original programs.
Requiring the player's own data did not protect re3 and reVC. A GameFrame project publishes only new code, written from documented behaviour. Each project writes down its process so that anyone can check it.
Pages in this chapter
- Treaties: the rules all countries share, and the points each country decides.
- United States, Europe and the United Kingdom: the US, the EU, the UK, Norway and Switzerland.
- East Asia: Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong.
- South and Southeast Asia and Oceania: India, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand.
- The Americas: Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia.
- Africa, the Middle East, Other Nations: South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Ukraine.
- 35 countries compared: one table.
Each country section uses the same headings: studying a program, locks, libraries and archives, how long copyright lasts, owners who cannot be found, cases, and games that shut down. "(not confirmed)" marks a point that has not been checked against the official text.