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Originally Posted by Shawn319
All it takes is one Cease and desist e-mail and its over. I hope it doesnt come to that but you never know.
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Actually, saying that right there is reason enough for them to do it. It costs Verant virtually nothing to send a cease and desist.
What you need to do is portray the image that you are well able to litigate if necessary. In fact, the reason I intend to distribute the files is precisely because I have the financial resources to deal with Verant should they find it necessary to pursue legal action.
Also, if necessary, this emulators could work like Fairlight, Deviance, and other cracking groups currently do: without any centralized location. Because of decentralization, these cracking groups will exist indefinitely. And I can assure you that the FBI would much rather catch a cracking group costing software companies millions in dollars every year than they would catching an emulator group that barely even makes a dent in Verant's revenues.
But even decentralization can fail against a dedicated FBI agent. In fact, a number of the groups either end up getting caught all socializing in one IRC room where they are individually located for a simultaneous bust, or they are looked up one at a time, till the FBI has a good idea of the number of them that can be caught at once.
If even one of them fails to get apprehended, they can cause a ruckus though. Which is why groups oftentimes "create" new personalities to furthur hide their true number. It is rumored that some cracking groups might only be two or three people where the number appears to be twenty.
Also, cracker location can be narrowed down by checking to see which games from which publishers are being warez'd. Or by marking CDs in different regions with different "loose files" that identify what part of the US/Canada the software was sent to.
Anyway, I've talked to long. But the main point here is don't say that you'll give up if Verant sends a cease and desist, because it costs them virtually nothing to do so. Just run the emulator as you see fit and if you are contacted, deal with whatever situation confronts you. If they say to remove a link here or there, then tell them you'll agree if they'll agree to contact you about material they find legally questionable *before* pursuing legal action.
You might find that they honestly don't give a shit that 50 people use the emulator at the same time they are paying Verant for access. They aren't down any money, and they have happy customers. There's only a select handful of emulator users that probably don't have an account anyway, so they risk losing more users (irrate customers who are avid participaters of the emulator project) then they would gain if they shut you down.
You have far more sway in talks with Verant than you think. After all, you have a website. If they tell you to shut everything down related to EQ, you can still leave up a big nasty message requesting that those with accounts through Verant quit over the actions they took to shut down the emu.
It's a question of numbers. Verant will only show legitimate interest in shutting down the mod if the numbers swing their way. And by saying a cease and desist will go unappealed, you're making it financially feasible for them to shut the project down.
There not licensing the software to you to use for personal use. Warez goes way beyond distribution copywrited software 
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