Are original maps de-compilable?
So using the piston brush from an official map is wrong?
Afaik it won't be illegal if you decompile it for educational purpose. It's handy for some reverse engineering, but it's even greater if you find out yourself. I would use it as last measure and not as a massive time saving measure.
There are no laws and no case law on the topic, so stating that it is either legal or illegal is irrelevant. However, a good case could be made for copyright infringement if you started distributing Valve's copyrighted material. But "maps" are an unexplored area of intellectual property.
That said, legality is also not the important issue here. It is the position of the TWP staff that decompiling maps for education purposes is allowable, but copying materials directly from them or anything of the sort is unprofessional and will not be tolerated.
That said, legality is also not the important issue here. It is the position of the TWP staff that decompiling maps for education purposes is allowable, but copying materials directly from them or anything of the sort is unprofessional and will not be tolerated.
Copyright does apply to maps (maybe not to the decompiling in specific, but you can guess what most people's intentions are, that's why I stated that decompiling for educational purpose is legal, decompiling, editing and redistributing is not). So stating it's legal or illegal is relevant.
And I was/am talking about copyright yes, although this is quite different when you compare Europe to the US. I would dig into this subject some more before you make statements like this, because what you see in Counter-Strike: Source, maps like dust2 in a snow setting, or other edited maps, are copyright infringement.
I did try and dig deeper, and like I said, I could find no case law or statues for copyrighting individual maps. Maps as a part of a larger piece of commercial software (for which copyright is well established) like de_dust are just like any other piece of the software.
However, the reason that I stated that strict legality was irrelevant is because the TWP staff won't tolerate posting decompiled maps, legal or not. Decompile all you like, discuss decompilation, and discuss VMEX all you like, just keep any links to decompiled maps or other warez off the forums per the forum rules. Going to add any direct links on where to get vmex at to this list. --msleeper
Hedge, if you want to keep the copyright discussion going, by all means, please create another thread. But the main question of how to learn from official maps has been answered and this discussion is over.