How can one open a profitable MMORPG private server (server emulator) legally? Background The MMORPG in question has a Korean developer and a German publisher. It is pretty old, but is still live and running by the publisher. The game appears to be dying and has a very low active population in general. The EULA seems to prohibit packet-sniffing and reverse-engineering to &quot;reproduce ... the games&quot; by the wording used, however that does not seem to make it illegal. Merely voids ones contract between emulator-developer and the publisher, giving them the right to ban use of their servers/services, if I am not mistaken. There was an excellent answer, in my opinion, on a related question in Law StackExchange [1]. I am a European citizen. It is meant to be a hobby project originally, but seeing as how much time it takes to execute, it is sad to not see the effort be financially profitable, especially considering the potential it may have. The intention is first to replicate, and finally to modify by changing experience point rates, quests, maps and more, to re-form the entire flow and experience of the player, differing from the original game. There are leaked server files and possibly leaked source code to the server files, but I will not peek at neither the reverse-engineered leaked software, nor the leaked source code, as it defeats entirely the original purpose. Hence, unless I misunderstand, the &quot;Chinese Wall&quot; principle [1] applies, since packet-sniffing and reverse-engineering of the game client are the tools used. Unless I have misinterpreted [1], the game client appears to be the major stopper, before even getting to the financial aspects. Questions If at all possible, how can one go from writing the MMORPG server emulator, from scratch, to running a profitable server, legally, for the specific game described above? Also, an auxiliary question: is breach of the EULA illegal or immoral, in this case? Edit I want to explicitly point out that, as per [1], the server emulator would not be theft of code, but a recreation from the imagination. The work-flow to produce the emulator only involves dissecting of the game client and packet-sniffing of the communication between the original game server and the game client. The EULA does not state any legal action against these two methods. I have also added a secondary question to help out the discussion. [1] https://law.stackexchange.com/a/48393/34023
Profit changes everything. There is a tradition of tolerance (mostly) for &quot;fan projects&quot; which are totally not-for-profit. However that goes out the window very quickly once profit enters the picture (if the original publisher is excluded that is; Black Mesa had a happy integration of publisher and fan profit, since they also run the game distribution platform Steam). Because of the profit picture, licensing the game platform is your only viable option. And this is actually quite common; the original Half-Life (on which Black Mesa was built) had licensed the Quake engine.) At the least you would be licensing the client-side engine. I suspect you also aim to license the client-side graphics as well; the publisher may have feelings about that since visual IP tends to dilute the uniqueness of their own game. For instance Half-Life did not reuse Quake monsters or art. Art is a problem, because it also brings in lore In a modern MMO, recreating graphics and art is a considerable task. But if you don't, you may not be able to separate yourself from the conceptuals: If you were licensing a World of Warcraft client and using WoW art, it would be hard to justify purple, pink and green Elves without getting into the lore of the Night Elves and Blood Elves breaking away from the high-elf lineage... it would just be too jarring to use the same art assets yet have totally different lore... So at that point your game would become a &quot;World of Warcraft story&quot;, which not surprisingly, the publisher would be much more reluctant to publish, since they want to retain creative control of their story, integrate it into their continuity, etc. Star Trek and Star Wars have whole staffs of &quot;canon police&quot; who make sure writers don't contradict existing lore, e.g. portray the Ferengi as a warrior race or Gungans in any way whatsoever. If it's just the engine, that's easy So if you are forced to change lore and art, and your plan is already to scratchbuild a new back-end... then really, all you're doing is licensing the game engine. So now the question is, why would you rely on brand X's game engine, when there are plenty of other game engines whose owners are happy to license them cheap, and even ones that are open-source? For instance, a fan project is re-casting Half Life II into the Unreal engine. So if we're not using that publisher's lore... and we're not using that publisher's art... and we're not using that publisher's engine... then we owe them nothing and we have a totally original game. Look at a program like The Guild. It was based on World of Warcraft, but the team tweaked it a little bit so it didn't touch any of Blizzard's IP at all. They did that for a reason.
The law in every country where your service is available prevails. That means that if your servers are in Estonia, your file storage is in Lithuania, your company is in Switzerland, you are in France, you hold Thai citizenship, your users are in the USA and the signal transits through the U.K., Belgium, Germany, Canada and Poland then you are subject to the laws of each and every one of them. In addition, if China has reason to believe that the stored files contain matters relating to their citizens then they can take an interest. And so on and so forth ... A country has jurisdiction wherever it wants to have jurisdiction subject to the limits of and its ability to actually enforce its laws. What you are proposing is certainly illegal in many countries and you need to seek professional legal advice - not rely on strangers on the internet.
Yes, this is gambling. The coupons have a value; gambling is the wagering of something of value. As to if it is illegal gambling, that would depend on the law in the jurisdiction where it takes place: for an internet transaction this could be the jurisdiction of the website owner or the user or both. As an example: in Australia, the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 is administered by the Department of Communication and the Arts, it provides: Any game of chance, including games of mixed chance and skill played over the internet, is prohibited under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 if it’s provided to someone who is physically in Australia. The Act defines a gambling service as: gambling service means: (a) a service for the placing, making, receiving or acceptance of bets; or (b) a service the sole or dominant purpose of which is to introduce individuals who wish to make or place bets to individuals who are willing to receive or accept those bets; or (c) a service for the conduct of a lottery; or (d) a service for the supply of lottery tickets; or (e) a service for the conduct of a game, where: (i) the game is played for money or anything else of value; and (ii) the game is a game of chance or of mixed chance and skill; and (iii) a customer of the service gives or agrees to give consideration to play or enter the game; or (f) a gambling service (within the ordinary meaning of that expression) that is not covered by any of the above paragraphs. The Act provides exemptions, however, based on the small amount of information in your question its hard to tell if any would apply. Broadly, the exemptions allow for certain types of gaming to be licensed/regulated. The Act applies to any service that may be accessed by people in Australia irrespective of where it is in the world.
It is possible to abandon copyright ... maybe. However, this game has not been abandoned. When the owner of the company was liquidated, the copyright became the legal property of the liquidator in trust for the creditors. It is for him or her to decide how to deal with the property but the copyright still exists until 70 years after the author(s) death. If you allow downloads you are breaching copyright unless you have permission (or you meet the Fair Dealing criteria - you probably don't). The person to seek permission from is the liquidator od the company. If you get sued they do not need to demonstrate financial loss - copyright claims can either be pursued for actual or statutory damages, that is, a fixed amount per violation. In addition, in egregious cases, copyright violation is a crime prosecutable by the state.
...due to the international registration of multiple domains to generate ad revenue by recycling stories across sock puppet networks, giving the impression of multiple, independent companies. None of that is illegal on its face. Internet domains are freely registerable by anyone, anywhere (with the exception of some laws in some nations that restrict such Internet-related activity), and registered privately or publicly, and websites can be hosted anywhere. Writing articles and "spinning" and copying articles (even if that writing is sales gibberish in broken English) among the same copyright owner is legal, and using the same design and layout for a network of sites is legal. The formation of multiple, related companies and shell companies to give the impression that companies are separate and independent is legal (again, with the exception of some business and corporate laws in some nations that restrict such activity). These are all common business practices. Some business practices may appear to be unethical - trying to fool customers in order to make money and get clicks and sell ads. And what you may be feeling is that such activity is unethical. And that's OK. But feeling that they are unethical doesn't make the practices illegal. Many common activities that are considered to be unethical are illegal; but not all. Buyer beware. One way some of that activity may be illegal is if those articles are factually incorrect and promote quack medical treatments, are financial scams requiring payments, are gambling sites or promote other clearly illegal things. But then you get into the complexity of exactly how they are illegal, which jurisdictions are involved, and on and on.
No, it's not illegal... Ads are shown as a contract between the site that hosts it and the advertising company. The contract does not stipulate that customers need to buy something, in fact, the contract can't force the customer to buy anything! At best, the contract can pay the hosting site based on the ad being shown, clicked, or any sale made after it. ...but you will do exactly the opposite Advertizement is made to put your own brand into the head of people. In fact, most ads don't have any effect on people. As I am writing this, ads for a kid TV, travels to Turkey and the primetime films for the weekend on the TV-station I have on are shown. I have no intention of consuming any of these advertised products. Impact of a campaign is measured by two metrics: people reached, and people responding. People reached is measured in clicks. People responding is measured in changes in earnings or sales. Clicking the ad increases the reached rating. If the rating is bad, the ad campaign is just ineffective... which leads to the most paradoxical thing: Bad advertisement and good advertisement both lead to more advertisement - bad to level out the missing response, good to maximize the response. By clicking on the ad you just funnel more money to the ad industry. When does it get illegal? [DDOS] The only way it would become illegal is if John Doe sets up a computer - or rather a botnet - and has that network click the ads thousands of times per second. Google can handle easily 83,000 searches per second, twitter gets more than 9000 tweets that are distributed to millions of people, Tumbler and Instagram handle together about 2500 posts per second. In fact, every second, more than 100000 Gigabytes of traffic run through the net. To have an impact on one site, you need to be truly a large number of calls... and then it is called a DDOS. DDOS is illegal under the CFAA, in this case 18 UC 1030: (a)Whoever— (5) (A)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; (b)Whoever conspires to commit or attempts to commit an offense under subsection (a) of this section shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section. In the UK, you'd break the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 section 3, because denying someone else service via DDOS is unauthorized, clearly unauthorized, and prevents access to any data (the website) on any computer (the server): (1)A person is guilty of an offence if— (a)he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer; (b)at the time when he does the act he knows that it is unauthorised; and (c)either subsection (2) or subsection (3) below applies. (2)This subsection applies if the person intends by doing the act— (b)to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer But can a DDOS be protest? [NO!] Anonymous attempted to petition to make DDOS a legal form of protest in 2013. The petition got 6,048 of the 25000 signatures needed to warrant an answer by the white house - unlike people in 2016 asking for a Death Star. At least it prompted Joshua I. James to write a research paper about the proposal in March. He too points to the CFAA and Section 5A, especially the sentence I quoted above. Among a lot of stipulations, he points out that internet protest in the shape of a DDOS would need to follow the same rules as a legal protest on the streets - which for example demands that entrance to businesses can't be blocked, and one is not allowed to harass employees and customers. According to the general rules for legal protest as given, there are still a number of challenges. First and foremost, entrances to businesses should not be blocked. In terms of DDoS, if sustained denial of service takes place, then access (entrance) to the server (business)is eﬀectively blocked. This means that, at a minimum, sustained denial of service should be considered as a non-legal approach to protesting. Thus, he concludes sustained DDOS is per se can't be a legal protest, and even a non-sustained DDOS would impact people using the site in a way they will deem harassing - which means that even a non-permanent DDOS can't be a legal protest. And then comes the final blow: DDOS, unlike a real protest on the streets, can't, by its very nature, inform people of why there is protest, even if it were a form of protest! This means that nobody knows it is meant to be a protest and not a normal DDOS, and as it can't convey what the action is about, it can't be a proper protest.
The reason is 17 USC 106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work The original picture is the underlying protected work. The ASCII reproduction is a derivative work. If you get permission to make the derivative work, it is okay. Otherwise, it is copyright infringement. There is an escape clause, "fair use", which amounts to taking a chance that you won't be sued and then arguing that you didn't do them any prohibited harm. If you make any money off of the game, you have a major strike against you. I suggest reading the fair use FAQ; basically, it is really hard to know how a fair use defense will fare, but based on prior cases, I'd say it's infringement, not fair use.
Short Answer No, you may not do this legally without permission in the form of a license from the owners of this intellectual property. Your video game based merch business plan is a horrible, horrible idea. There is no reasonable way that you could have known just how horribly awful and bad an idea this was without talking to someone familiar with the law. So, I'm not saying that this was a stupid or unreasonable question. But, now, you know. And, you should run away from this idea as fast as you can. Long Answer What you are proposing to do is blatant infringement of copyright (and trademarks) through the creation of derviative works, on a systematic basis, for profit, without permission, in a manner that does not constitute a parody or satire or any form of fair use. This kind of economic activity is precisely what copyright and trademark laws are designed to prevent. The case against you for liability could only get more clear if you were selling pirated copies of the game itself. You would have no legal defenses (other than statute of limitations if they waited to many years to sue you, which they almost certainly would not). You would be liable for statutory damages of up to many thousands of dollars per infringing item and the attorneys' fees the intellectual property owners incurred to sue you. The owners of the games could probably get a court order to destroy all of your merchandise, and a restraining order and injunction to force you to immediately shut down your business at any time. They could obtain all of those remedies without sending you a cease and desist letter before suing you. The moderately likely worst case scenario economic liability that you would face would be on the order of 100 times the amount of profits you could hope to make in a best case scenario, and the likelihood that you would incur some significant civil liability is on the order of 85%-90% (with almost of of the little or no civil liability percentage attributed to scenarios in which the company doesn't notice that you are infringing upon its intellectual property rights). Also, the more profitable you are and the higher the volume of goods you sell, the more likely you are to be sued. The liability risk to profit ratio grows with each additional dollar of profit you make. There is a good chance (perhaps 65%-75%) that they could establish that your violation was willful and wanton in these circumstances, which would also prevent you from discharging any part of the massive judgment against you in bankruptcy. So, there is a better than 50% chance that you'd be stuck with an intellectual property rights infringement debt, which could easily run into the high hundreds of thousand or even many millions of dollars, plus post-judgment interest at a rate similar to the market rate for high risk junk bonds, for the rest of your life. In terms of the economic harm involved to you, this would be almost as bad as having all of your property seized and then being sold into slavery for the rest of your life, if a coin toss bet comes up tails, but you get to keep the coin if it comes up heads. A settlement in which you turned over every penny you ever made in the venture, destroyed all of your products, shut down the business and paid them an additional low five figure amount in lieu of penalties and attorneys' fees would be a very generous offer. You would also face a real risk (perhaps 10%-15%) of some low level felony criminal liability (perhaps several years in prison). This is a business plan that is so toxic with immense, near certain liability risks of the worst possible kind that you should put on gloves before picking it up and tossing it into your nearest available fireplace or campfire. This business plan poses more liability risk to you than opening up a nightclub, bribing your contractors and code inspectors to ignore all fire and electrical codes, painting the walls with turpentine, padlocking all of the exit doors from the outside, changing a $1 cover and selling booze at cost to get huge crowds, and then booking bands with lots of fireworks in their stage shows on a nightly basis. (Yes, I really had a client who was stupid enough to come up with this business plan until I talked him out of it.) From a civil liability perspective, you would have less exposure to economic liability if you started a business that involved abducting random cats and dogs and goats off the street and charging customers to forcibly rape and then mutilate them, while filming it for distribution on the Internet with your real name and fingerprints in a watermark on every image and close ups of the animals collar tags and the goats' brands. The likelihood of criminal liability would be quite a bit greater (perhaps 60%-80%), however, even though the punishment if you were convicted of felonies for the bestiality business would be similar to the punishment for a conviction for copyright and trademark infringement. (Thankfully, I have yet to see a client try to implement this business plan.) Go hire someone to secure a license from the intellectual property owner for you (perhaps an IP lawyer or an agent or broker), or forget about it. This is an industry where you absolutely must be legitimate, and you have to go big or go home. The economies of scale are simply too immense to ignore. If your anticipated gross sales aren't at least $500,000 a year or so, you probably shouldn't even consider doing it whether it is legal or not. A license, if you could get it, would probably cost $6,000 to $12,000 in professional fees to negotiate (if you could accomplish this feat at all), perhaps a similar amount for an upfront fee to the intellectual property holder, and probably 10%-35% of your profits on an ongoing basis. This is because the market rate of licenses of this kind are geared towards what large scale distributors selling wholesale to Wal-Marts, department stores, and national mall chains could bear (I have some clients that happily pay these kinds of license fees so they can sell branded products, manufactured in China and then imported, on a high volume national basis.) The license fees would be a huge bargain by comparison to your economic exposure to infringement liability. But, if even the licensing fees (if you could negotiate a deal to pay them) are too expensive, then, this business plan doesn't make economic sense even with permission in the form of a license from the intellectual property owner. In that case, you should instead go into the lemonade stand business or buy a food truck, or become an Uber driver, or open a coffee shop or a liquor store, or something like that, with less liability risk and a more proven business model. If you must make video game merch without permission, do it in a back alley of a small town in rural Mexico on a cash only basis (where lots of people do stuff like this without getting caught), rather than an online store, where any bored paralegal or network manager in the video game company's law firm can find you at a moment's notice and might win a promotion or a raise or a bonus for doing so.