Abstract
Video game “decompilations”—a potentially technically inaccurate term referring to fan efforts to entirely reprogram video games based on reverse engineering those games—present an interesting case study for evaluating the scope of video game copyrightability, fair use, and public expectations about content availability. Decompilations usually comprise entirely new code and do not comprise any assets of the original video game, suggesting that the decompilations, if viewed as mere code, do not apparently infringe any video game copyrights. That said, decompilations illustrate why copyright protects more than the discrete assets (e.g., art or music) of a video game, as decompilations are generally designed to capture the totality of creative labor in that video game. Decompilations also touch on a larger issue with intellectual property law and policy: the extent of the public’s right to expect that a creative work remains accessible (e.g., on modern hardware). While traditional concepts of fair use might not defend decompilation developers from copyright infringement suits, an analysis of fair use in view of this larger issue of accessibility and through the perspective of property interests presents a different conclusion, suggesting that fans have a right to preserve access to video games in certain circumstances. This Article leverages the modern scholarly interest in connecting the underlying justification for intellectual property with Locke’s theory of property to analyze decompilations, concluding that—while decompilations are copyright infringing—they should be protected as fair use in circumstances where they operate to protect video games from unavailability due to technological obsolescence.