What are the chances of EQEmu being shutdown?
 

Hello,

This is just a general discussion thread. What are the chances Daybreak takes action against EQEMU? (Clearly we have a better product at this point!)

Typically, you didn't see many private servers go down, unless they were charging for features or such. In the case of the recent Vanilla WoW server that went down, they were completely free (I believe) and accept donations for costs. But still, Blizzard struck them down for utilizing copyrighted content for a 10 year base game.

With the state Daybreak is in, I fear they will come after you guys next. Or possibly EQ2Emu.

They have recognized us as fan servers. There is little to no chance they shut us down.

Thank you for the great replies all! I did not know about the agreement. Happy to see one company not go after fans.

I would venture that the mentioned agreement is actually irrelevant to the OP, sorry to say. Note that the actual agreement isn't posted anywhere, and the fact that you're even asking this basically indicates that you're not covered by that agreement. The announcement specifically refers to P99, not EQEmu and certainly not all EQEmu servers nor other individual servers or projects. P99 probably uses their own fork of EQEmu, also, so if the software is part of the agreement, it might well only cover that fork.

I can't imagine that the agreement retroactively, or, coincidentally (?), covers all other not-for-profit EQEmu servers in addition to P99, although that would be great. I don't see how it can legally include anyone that doesn't even know the content of it, either, so I don't see how it could cover anyone else that runs their own server.

I don't think Daybreak would go after anyone running a not-for-profit server, and I'm not worried about it personally, but if you are concerned about this, do not rely on that announcement as assurance that you won't receive a takedown notice. An announcement is not an agreement, and an agreement to which you were not a party, in which you are likely not named, you likely did not sign, and of which you don't even know the details, it extremely likely to not involve or cover you at all.

It's a good thing for the P99 people, but I'm pretty certain only the P99 people, probably not even the EQEmu project. Don't get me wrong, I like P99, what they have accomplished is great, I'm just adding a dose of reality to this thread.

Note everything below is just my opinion.

Legend:
IP = intellectual property, this is the creative either patented, copyrighted, or protected in other ways by a company.
DBG: Daybreak Games, the current owner of the Everquest franchise.
P99: Project 1999, a private eqemu server.

That aside, P99 shows that DBG is at least amiable to the approach of emulated servers. Once a server gets significant enough to catch the attention of DBG, either positively or negatively, is the only time you'll truly know how compliant you are to DBG's terms. Notice in P99's case, DBG was looking for compliance, namely the upcoming progression servers, they felt the release of velious in P99 clashed competitively with the progression server's opportunity to attract players. It was discussed (those terms were not heavily disclosed), and as long as P99 retains compliance (in this case, they delayed Velious release) it shows some reassurance that DBG is not extremely evil about entirely shutting off private servers at this time. (Some gaming companies are aggressive about this)

If a server is not making significant money or equal value in other means (high traffic/population/attention), there's a decent chance you'll stay under the radar until a sweep occurs (where DBG lawyers sweep across offenders of a certain criteria generically sending letters of violation) and that sweep will likely be a cease and desist, with terms in order to restore a compliant nature. I don't think I've ever heard of a sweep happening on Everquest however.

Some times a sweep will have a request a takedown notice of the server when DBG's lawyers feels it's a bad enough offense that hurts the business or protection of IP, but it's case by case, and I don't think there's any way currently to officially know a server's standings are in DBG's view until such terms are discussed between entities. There are laws that should be abided to regardless. General rule, if you're making money off someone else's IP, there are a lot of laws to protect the IP holder, the question ultimately becomes if it is in the interest of DBG to prosecute or not. (And if it's worth the money or recovery of cumulative damages, since lawyers aren't cheap as well as lost revenue is not ideal to any company)

Zero.

Nostalrius gave away free downloads of the game client.

I think I'll revive this thread in 3 months just to repeat the same information posted in April and then again in July.

Because of the post title, every time I see it I have a minor panic attack thinking its an announcement that something is happening.

Changed the title so people don't freak as much

Hah, I had the exact same thought. "Must be that time of year"

I did have one curious thought about this in relation to the whole "open source" thing.
I have no idea what all the legalities are for using or playing around with the code, but
anyone who does, is it a situation where we can only use the source to play with at home ?
or are we allowed to use that source to start up a "non-profit" free to play public server ?
Or is it simply tagged as "educational purposes only" (chuckle) I know DBG is pretty relaxed
on all this, no concern there, but from a technical point of view, what are we allowed to
legally do with the "open source"

This has all been covered ad nauseam. The project is GPL, so it follows the rules of that.

https://github.com/EQEmu/Server/blob/master/GPL.txt