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An interesting question of legality of private servers
brian72282
Member UncommonPosts: 783
Ok, we all know private servers are a HUGE grey area in the law. However, private servers tend to fall into 1 of 3 catagories: Emulations of current games, stolen server files, or emulations of games no longer running. While games no longer running generally isn't an issue, unless the game's source is being used for another project, emulations of current games is widely seen as illegal.
Why do game companies say it's illegal? Well, mainly because it is. While it's 100% legal to create an emulation of a server through backwards engineering, the law clearly states that running it for others to access is illegal. This is because most online games that are emulated are MMOs, and as such, their income is from monthly fees. Private servers cut into that revenue.
What about emulation of a free game though? Perhaps one of those korean MMOs that are free, or how about games like Guild Wars? Buy the box and online play is free. That's a lot like FPS games that GIVE you their source for free to host your own servers. While I admit the differences in source code between an FPS and an MMO (or CORPG in GW's case) are enormous, would it really be illegal to run a private server emulating their servers? How about trying to get them to release the source?
I ask because think of the cost of servers per month for games like GW that have that large of a following. Yes, they still make a good amount of money, but by giving access to the source and allowing others to run their own servers would be even more profitable, not to mention allow better play for consumers. In general, the people I've met on GW (other than those in the guild I belong to for D2) have been a bunch of immature little kids. A privately run server would allow a better community which is what I (and many others) seek. Anyways, I'd like to hear some other people's beliefs are in this issue. I intend on contacting a lawyer to see what they say about this, however I expect to hear more of the "grey area" discussion from them as well.
Comments
There is no gray area. It is illegal simply because the company has copyrighted the souce code. One of the first paragraphs in the terms of mmorpgs is (paraphrased) "We own the source code, it is copyrighted by us, agree to these terms or repackage the game and return it for a refund".
Well most of the time it's in the EULA, which we all know doesn't hold up in court. My main concern is specifically about games like Guild Wars (as there's several coming out soon, like Tactica Online) that are not playable offline, there's no monthly fee, yet only 1 way to play. To be honest, I'm not sure about the stability long term (2+ years) of games like this. While it's true Diablo 2 is still alive and kicking, Blizzard LONG ago made rediculous deals with their server hosts to lock them in at really low rates. Over time they've consolidated servers, and it's laggy as all hell. However, they do have offline play, so it's not a complete loss. However, what if NCSoft one day looks at the profit margins and says "wow, we're not making enough (or we're losing money) on Guild Wars, we're gonna pull the plug"? Then, you have a completely useless game.
Okay, having some extensive relation with pirate servers <*cough*> I feel that I'm qualified to shed some light on this subject. It is absolutely 100% illegal. Then again, so are all those old NES, SNES, Genesis, and Neo Geo ROMS I have on my hard drive (I don't mess with MAME). The wide spread use of pirate servers hasn't stopped one person from paying the monthly fee to the companies that make the original games. If all the pirate servers disappeared tomarrow, it wouldn't cause even one pirate server user to cough up the monthly fee to the developers of the original game.
And monthly fees are the central reason why people play on pirate servers. Most of us don't mind shelling out $50 for the box. We DO mind paying $15 a month ON TOP of the $50 for the box and AN ADDITIONAL $30 to $50 for any expansions. Also, most free games aren't really free. Most of those games are free to a certain level (Priston Tale) or have exclusive content that you have to pay monthly for (Runescape). Some even have cleverly hidden fees (charging money for items and XP at later levels). $200+ annually for one game that requires a $600 per year broadband connection is just plain ridiculous. Of course, I've never played a MMORPG for a whole year, but you get my meaning.
It's for this reason that the pirate community has gone into coniptions every time someone has mentioned making a Guild Wars emulator. NCSoft will never have to worry about shutting down a GW pirate server because pirate players will shut it down faster than Arenanet ever could.
I'd also like to add that the majority of emulators are made for korean games and involve patching the korean version of the client. International copywrites and patents are significantly complicated enough that shutting down one of these servers would cost way more than allowing it to continue. The two exceptions to this being RunUO and EQ Emu. EQ emulators get shut down fairly quickly. Usually because the admins of those servers put up websites that SOE employees can easily find with google. To find an EQ pirate server, you have to actually TALK to people in the pirate scene. UO was allowed to thrive due to an obscure hole in the original EULA that allowed people to run their own servers provided that the server ran it's own world and didn't infringe on the trademarks of the Ultima franchise. That's changed of couse, but the damage had already been done. UO freeshards are also very rarely advertised on their own websites. There is at least one utility for UO that actually finds and hooks up the client to a large list of available freeshards. There are also pirate message boards that announce UO servers.
Which are also a lot of reasons why people DONT play free servers. Games like WoW have serverside content (missions, NPC locations, everything) so that even if you are to reverse engineer a server (which basically means packet sniff for hours on end to figure out what is being sent/recieved in order to find out how to interpret that data into usable data).
So, private servers always lack quests/npc/drop rates and everything you normally think about when you play your favorite. Its almost like its the graphics of your favorite game... but with everything else in it changed.
But yes, they are 100% legal as you are taking someone elses leased property, and using it against their will. Unless they release a public use server, its basically best to stay away from such things.
Im playing on private server right now because its much better than original. Im talking about Ultima Online and server named XXXXXXXXX(Deleted by me). The time when people was creating private servers just to play for free is gone (At least for UO). Now people making a private shards to recreate a golden age of UO which was killed by EA at production shards. So its not matter of money anymore. Its something a very very different.
And by the way private shards isnt illegal because they not using any copyrighted code to recreate game mechanics.
Technically, according to the law, it's illegal to allow anyone besides yourself onto an emulation of a server. No one is arguing that point. My point mainly, is that games that are online only, but monthly-fee free (like GW) should open up their code, or at least allow emulations. Most private servers for games I've played (so long as it was run by a decent coder) have been lag free, and had a decent amount of content. What I care about is community. Right now, GW is FULL of 10-14 year old kiddies who swear a lot, use phrases I find offensive, and generally are obnoxious. I refuse to play it in that state. Even if I'm just killing them, I still have to listen to them rant and rave and call me all sorts of names and a cheater, when in all honesty I'm just better than them. The point is, private servers tend to have a better community than commercial servers, and I believe that players should unite and press for either the server code to be made open source (which is probably a pipe dream), or at least do as a lot of FPS games and release the server code to reputable server farms that will charge a reasonable monthly fee for several guilds to go in on together, so they can dictate who they can and can't play with.