First official update since Nostalrius shutdown

[Enjurbn]

Don't you understand what he meant? Really? It had nothing to do with you making profit, rather than with the Nostalrius project being illegal from the day 1 in the eyes of Blizzard, you knew damn well their stance on private servers when you started it, that they are against it.

The poster claimed that Nostalrius stole code from Blizzard. That is not true. As for the illegality of private servers, well, they are in a grey zone. Making a profit off of Blizzard's intellectual property is of course illegal and that has been confirmed in a US court. However, offering a gaming service that Blizzard does not offer, in a non-profit manner, has not been deemed illegal - to my knowledge - in any court of law. We wished to offer as authentic vanilla server as possible with our limited resources, to all players whether returners or new comers. We did not want to contest Blizzard's trademark or copyright in the first place and, aside from few exceptions, they have previously turned a blind eye towards non-profit private servers. I hope you can see the difference.

Hmm, what difference exactly? Is sharing a song in a non-profit way legal? No, it is not. You used blizzards assets like models, names, music, lore etc, its not in a grey zone, it's illegal. And it doesn't matter that you did it for the love of the game or what else, its doesn't matter to a big corporation one bit. You did not know that? You said it yourself, "aside from a few exceptions", so you knew that, right? Blizzard's spokesmen many times said that they deem all private servers illegal as far as I remember, so.. can you really say that you thought that Blizzard would approve of your fan project? Because now you're using it as an excuse to stop all your activities, they dont want us to do it so we stop basically, like it could have been any different.

And it just boggles my mind that you care so much what Blizzard thinks, are you fans of the game or fans of the company? They dont make games like that anymore

[Roadbl0ck]

Look.

There's 2 entities that hope and pray this thing blows over soon.
Blizzard and former Nostalrius.

Each from a different side of the spectrum.
- Blizzard hopes all the gaming media will stop making a fuss and move to the next "hot" topic, because they're not exactly getting good PR.
- Nostalrius team hopes all the former players will get tired of waiting and disperse to other private servers and stop asking for some kind of continuation to Nostalrius.
Just move on already so we can distance ourselves from this snake pit.

If that hasn't been achieved by April 30th and there's still people clamoring for their characters and server code to be open sourced, they'll delay it some more until it does.
That way they lose any liability and "save some face" in the process.
And hey there's always hope Blizz goes after the next big thing and heat goes away.

We'll probably both be here in 2 weeks time (if the forum is still up) to reference this post.

[Robotron]

Don't you understand what he meant? Really? It had nothing to do with you making profit, rather than with the Nostalrius project being illegal from the day 1 in the eyes of Blizzard, you knew damn well their stance on private servers when you started it, that they are against it.

The poster claimed that Nostalrius stole code from Blizzard. That is not true. As for the illegality of private servers, well, they are in a grey zone. Making a profit off of Blizzard's intellectual property is of course illegal and that has been confirmed in a US court. However, offering a gaming service that Blizzard does not offer, in a non-profit manner, has not been deemed illegal - to my knowledge - in any court of law. We wished to offer as authentic vanilla server as possible with our limited resources, to all players whether returners or new comers. We did not want to contest Blizzard's trademark or copyright in the first place and, aside from few exceptions, they have previously turned a blind eye towards non-profit private servers. I hope you can see the difference.

Yeah, exactly. Honestly, private servers should be legal as long as they meet both of the following conditions:

1) They do not attempt to emulate the game's current expansion.

2) They are 100% non-profit.

That's why I was taken aback when Nost said Blizzard was dropping the hammer on them, and there was no way to avoid it. It's not like Nost pulled a Molten and tried to make massive profits from its players.

The only piracy argument I can see in all of this is the use of the stock Mangos core, which was created like 10 years ago, though a completely stock server is basically unplayable because pretty much everything requires scripting.

[_Athena_]

Hmm, what difference exactly? Is sharing a song in a non-profit way legal? No, it is not. You used blizzards assets like models, names, music, lore etc, its not in a grey zone, it's illegal. And it doesn't matter that you did it for the love of the game or what else, its doesn't matter to a big corporation one bit. You did not know that? You said it yourself, "aside from a few exceptions", so you knew that, right? Blizzard's spokesmen many times said that they deem all private servers illegal as far as I remember, so.. can you really say that you thought that Blizzard would approve of your fan project? Because now you're using it as an excuse to stop all your activities, they dont want us to do it so we stop basically, like it could have been any different.

And it just boggles my mind that you care so much what Blizzard thinks, are you fans of the game or fans of the company? They dont make games like that anymore

Where did they ever make your client download any of these? They didn't. The only thing the server did is make it possible for existing clients, which you downloaded elsewhere, to open a socket connection to transfer packet data. Mocking packet structure isn't exactly illegal, as it is the same as re-creating any other existing software on the market, which is fine as long as you don't copy the original source. Since there is no source to begin with...

models, names, music, lore

The ones in red aren't in any way applicable, because they aren't being send. That's why World of Warcraft patches have always been relatively large, because they include any new or modified model, music and "lore" data involved in the new or updated content. Code changes are only a few kilobytes or megabytes depending on which binaries changed since the last patch. Names is in a way also irrelevant, because it's actually IDs that are being transmitted and the clients maps these to the name. The server doesn't even have any of this visual or audio data, which is also why you as a client can just change to say a French version of the WoW client, because the IDs are still the same, the client just maps them to different data (a French variant in this case) instead. Please don't ask me to explain how storing some numbers in code isn't illegal.

The way people should approach this is similar to the whole Nespresso cups. The machines are in this case the client, but which cup you put into them doesn't matter.

Do I need to explain this more?

[Docholy]

What a sad state of things. I know Nos will return, just got to find a way!

[Killershama]

Put your faith in the Nostalrius, and all is possible!

[Tebeda]

Don't you understand what he meant? Really? It had nothing to do with you making profit, rather than with the Nostalrius project being illegal from the day 1 in the eyes of Blizzard, you knew damn well their stance on private servers when you started it, that they are against it.

The poster claimed that Nostalrius stole code from Blizzard. That is not true. As for the illegality of private servers, well, they are in a grey zone. Making a profit off of Blizzard's intellectual property is of course illegal and that has been confirmed in a US court. However, offering a gaming service that Blizzard does not offer, in a non-profit manner, has not been deemed illegal - to my knowledge - in any court of law. We wished to offer as authentic vanilla server as possible with our limited resources, to all players whether returners or new comers. We did not want to contest Blizzard's trademark or copyright in the first place and, aside from few exceptions, they have previously turned a blind eye towards non-profit private servers. I hope you can see the difference.

Hmm, what difference exactly? Is sharing a song in a non-profit way legal? No, it is not. You used blizzards assets like models, names, music, lore etc, its not in a grey zone, it's illegal. And it doesn't matter that you did it for the love of the game or what else, its doesn't matter to a big corporation one bit. You did not know that? You said it yourself, "aside from a few exceptions", so you knew that, right? Blizzard's spokesmen many times said that they deem all private servers illegal as far as I remember, so.. can you really say that you thought that Blizzard would approve of your fan project? Because now you're using it as an excuse to stop all your activities, they dont want us to do it so we stop basically, like it could have been any different.

And it just boggles my mind that you care so much what Blizzard thinks, are you fans of the game or fans of the company? They dont make games like that anymore

So you're saying if I pop a CD into someone's stereo and you hear it, that's illegal?

[Aurkanthis]

So you're saying if I pop a CD into someone's stereo and you hear it, that's illegal?

Love this.

[Zarant]

Hmm, what difference exactly? Is sharing a song in a non-profit way legal? No, it is not.

Why do you think that the idea of moving the server to Russia or Finland started to pop up after the server shutdown announcement? Because US laws are very strict when it comes to copyright infringement, there is little to no gray area when the US constitution is applied, pretty much everything is a copyright infringement. However in some other regions those particular issues you mentioned can fall into the fair use clause of their respective copyright laws.

My point is: This is a gray area.

[Robotron]

So you're saying if I pop a CD into someone's stereo and you hear it, that's illegal?

According to SOPA, probably.