A curious newbie
 

How legal is this? I mean after EverQuest was emulated i thought Sony would smart-up, and make new User agreements & terms or some type of super encryption. Then again Sony could have looked at Eqemu as what it is, virtually a unique and seperate entity, and by comparision with their community a harmless tiny entity not worth tons of money destroying. Hmmm.

If they are loosing more money that what it would take do do something to the EQemu/EQ2emu community then they will do something. If it will take more money that it takes to do something to the EQemu/EQ2emu community then then they will let it pass/ignore it. This is not an official answer but it is what i believe to be the case. Besides to break Emu then all they have to do is change some opcodes it seems.

Old debate there, and you'll get a million responses if anyone notices the thread. In the end it can all come down to Trade Shares if Sony wanted to do anything about it, and just about every nation in the world, European included, are signed up under those copyright laws. So illegal, yes. Court-tested, no. Not something you'll have to worry about.

Eredhel

Illegal? Your lack of knowledge on the issue is what causes this misconception. Our code does not infringe upon any copyrights. If we took their code, copied it and then published it as our own, then yes it would be. But we dont. Our code is created as a 100% independant effort. If you want to compare it to anything, compare it to Samba. Samba is an application that allows someone to work directly with windows file shares from linux. The creator reversed engineered it in a way very similiar to our own methods. This is 100% legal. To reiterate, our project does violate their EULA, and you can get your accounts banned for it. But it is NOT illegal.

Woh Gratz Lethal on you number 8 post.

heh, just because I havent posted much using this username doesnt mean I am new to the community. In fact, I have been an EQEmu dev since Dec 2002. Where were you at that time? Before the forums were switched I had over 900 or so posts. In fact if you take the time to go back through older releases of the emu, you will see my name in the changelog as much as (or more than) anyone else. So yes, I do believe I know what I am talking about and post count is irrelevent.

Well said lethal, although I'm not sure if I agree with your comparison with Samba. If Microsoft revamped the networking protocol in lets say Longhorn, and later a successor to Samba was created, Microsoft wouldn't necessarily lose money. With a subscription service, it may be a little bit more worrisome for people, because they could, theoretically, lose money.

But, for the same reasons as Samba, right, EQEMu is not illegal and it was well put.

FYI, Microsoft just put up a patent on their FAT file system. Some claim Microsoft is doing this to lay the groundwork for filing patent infringement suits against any Linux module distributor who doesn't pay a royalty for working with that filesystem.

Actually you are wrong there Lethal. Reverse engineering of any digital media that is protected by encryption is illegal. As per the DMCA. Im sure there are several other points they could attack on if they decided it was worth it.

[quote]
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) generally prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures. On its face, since circumvention is generally required for reverse engineering, this prohibition would prevent reverse engineering of those measures that control access to a copyrighted work. The DMCA contains a limited exception to the ban on circumvention, which permits reverse engineering of the technology by specific classes of people for limited purposes [17 USC

I think that the best example of a fantastic way to avoid-a-copyright-lawsuit-while-still-doing-some-really-"illegal"-work is the Xbox Linux project (sponsored in part by Michael Robertson, also a big hater of the DMCA).