Earlier this year, a group of hackers successfully reverse engineered the source code for Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City. Thanks to their efforts, the projects were quickly eliminated by Take-Two's DMCA takedown. However, one developer not only disagreed with the publisher's decision, but successfully fought back and brought the fan-made code repository back online.

After years of community development, the Re3 and reVC projects improved the ancient crime sim with modern conveniences such as widescreen support, debug menus, and easy entry into modding. Fans loved it, but the game's original publishers did not, forcing them to remove all traces of the project from GitHub.

"The content at the following links consists of copyrighted material owned by Take-Two. Any use of our copyrighted content at these links is unauthorized and should be removed immediately."

However, according to TorrentFreak, a New Zealand coder calling himself Theo filed a countersuit last month. Theo maintained one of the forks containing Re3 and reVC and believed that Take-Two's claims against its code were invalid.

"It appears that the code in the re3 repo was reverse engineered and not straight reverse compiled. If so, I believe Take-Two's claims are completely wrong.

The Theo fork of the GTA 3 project has since been restored, but over 200 other forks of the code remain offline; DMCA rules state that challenged content is to be restored within 14 days of the challenge, but Take-Two could well fight back and drag Theo into court. However, Theo tells TorrentFreak that he is prepared for legal action, but does not expect the publisher to step in any further.

"I disagree with the way Take-Two handled these events," Theo added. 'It is abhorrent to take up a code that does not belong to them.'