not 100% sure, but i believe that there was a case against emulators and emulators won. I think it goes like this: As long as you own the legal copy of the game they cannot tell you how to play it. Thats why there is so many servers for other games like lineage2 and ragnarok has legal emulated servers as well as eqemu. Now, I'm aware that WoW won a case about Emus so i really dont know what to say, seems whoever has the most money wins. But EQ is dying they can only put up a fight for so long anyways. I havent read much the WoW case so I dont know the details.
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I'm pissed off.....
- Thread starter uuzi
- Start date
I don't know anything about the WoW case at all so you can pretty much chock this up to a guess but what I do know is that the emulator for WoW started way back when the Alpha Friends & Family version got leaked. I would venture to guess that if a case was won it might have been on the grounds that the stuff was stolen.
Right on the money. The precedent from the b.net emulator case doesn't really apply to an EQ emulator because (as far as I know) the EQ source code isn't stolen. If it were, Sony would no doubt pursue a case against SoD and the other big emulators, since they would have a win in the bag. As is, though, they'd be on questionable legal ground. Even if they could pull it off, it would take a hell of a lot of hours to build a case from the ground up, and even if they won it, it probably wouldn't make/save them very much money. Thus there's no real motivation to pursue a case.saltcreek said:I don't know anything about the WoW case at all so you can pretty much chock this up to a guess but what I do know is that the emulator for WoW started way back when the Alpha Friends & Family version got leaked. I would venture to guess that if a case was won it might have been on the grounds that the stuff was stolen.
That's most likely also why they'd growl about and send letters to emu hosts and the like, demanding cessation. It takes their lawyers like half an hour to get pertinent names and addresses and throw down a form letter. Those who don't have the motivation and/or resources to look into the matter will probably just shut down, and SOE wins by intimidation.
Doesn't matter regardless.... if you think SOE didn't already know about SoD, you're crazy. Also, I don't think there technically a copyright violation since there's no stolen sourcecode. Yeah it violates the point and click "terms of service" but the enforceability of those is a big legal grey area. I believe the server is hosted somewhere that doesn't observe US copyright law anyway.