Deconstructing Dice and Destiny: Reverse Engineering for Deterministic Insights into a Probabilistic Game

Abstract

All commercially produced works fall under the protection of copyright law, as governed by applicable intellectual property statutes. By default, copyright ownership is attributed to the original author of the work. For instance, if an individual creates and distributes a graphic design, they retain exclusive rights not only to the physical reproductions (e.g., prints or posters) as well as the original creative content. This standard equally applies within software development. A prominent example of a software copyright license is the GNU General Public License (GPL), a widely adopted free software license administered by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). If you modify a GPL-licensed program and distribute it, you must also make the modified source code available under the same GPL terms. This paper describes a reverse engineering effort to determine if a certain commercially released copy of a game contains GPL licensed software, in violation of the aims of the GPL. While the commercial software used in the project was sold roughly twenty years ago, the investigation techniques are applicable today and apply not just to the GPL but to intellectual property protection in general.