Just how legal are emulated MMOG servers?

[Jarulf]

I've always wondered about the legalities about emulating pay-for-play MMOG servers,

Emulators in themselves are typically legal in most places of the world. The fact that what is emulated cost money or not and if it icost if it is a one time fee or a monthly fee is quite irrelevant.

but I've never really dove too deep into the matter.  The closest I've come to actually researching it was during the Blizzard versus BnetD case, but that's different from most emulated MMOG's because battle.net isn't really a MMOG server and games playable over battle.net aren't freely downloadable from blizzard.com.

The prblem was not the emulation in itself in that case. Blizzard make a bunhc of claims, of which several later was removed. The main issues there though was the reverse engineering case. That had nothing to do with the seoftware itself but how they figured out how to write their software. Blizzard claimed they had agree to not reverse engineer. The other issue at hand was that of technical protection meassures on a copyrighted work which is a bit more complicated in its case and I can't really sum it up without looking at it again.

I would say that what you are asking about is not really emulators though, an emulator is typically something that allows you to run, for example, a program written for a specific computer/processor and so on, but instead uses the emulator to perform the instructions of the program. Hence a Comodore 64 emulator, will let you run an old commodore program (with no alterations really) despite your computer having a different processor, video system and so on. Basically the emulator will be the one reading each istruction and "emulate", that is, perform whatever actions needed for the end result to be the same. What you are asking about is more of an alternative server program, that perform the same services to a computer connecting to it. Basically a competing product.

Can anyone shed some light on this issue?  I'm particularly interested in how any laws would apply to the people that distributed the emulated server software, the people that are running the emulated server software, and the people (like me) that connect to and play on the emulated server.
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For the one making and distribution the emulator (if we stick to that word and use it in a broad manner), normal copyright laws apply, hence if it has code directly copied for example from another source, there can be issues of infirngement. One problem you can run into, especially if you write and use your emulator comercially, is that of trademarks. You can get into trouble if your emulator or software includes brands, logos and such that are protected by trademark.

As for running them, not much more problem that running any other software you can think of (see some commentes above if you do it on a comercial scale). Connecting to them? Same, no problem at all. There could at most be some claim that you have agreed to not connect or use a competing product, for example Blizzard tries in their service agreement to WoW to make it so that you agree to not connect to such a thing. I would say that such a term would in most countries in the world not be enforcable, it would be like a shop wanting you to agree to not shop at their competitors.

One final note is that to make it harder to actually connect to anything else but the "real" servers, recent games have built in various handshake functionalities that will make the client not acceot anything but the designed server for connection. In such cases you might have to modify your own client to make it possible to connect. That can or can not be problematic from a copyright perspective depending on what country you live in.

There are many other aspects, things to comment on and ponder over. Lets this be a starting point if anyone want to discuss more.