Private servers are illegal (and people are getting sued over them).
Maple story Forums : General Maple Story : General MS questions and answers Thread starter
First, give some love to ynarakit, who posted the original topic, which got glitched off the face of basil.To make things easier on the lazy people • Operating an unlicensed MapleStory server is copyright infringement. • Copyright infringement is illegal. • Do not talk about, encourage, promote, or enable illegal activity on this site. (Rule #6) But wait, what are these claims about the source code being legal? The source code is legal. You can type anything you want into a text file, freedom of speech. Compiling the source code into an executable is legal as well. It's just another representation of the text file. You can even run the executable. However, even though the files and their execution is legal, what they are used to do isn't necessarily so. Operating a server for a game you own or are licensed to provide service for is legal, operating an unlicensed MapleStory server is not. It's the same with knives; designing a knife is legal, manufacturing the knife from the design is legal, cutting fruit with the knife you made is legal, but cutting people with the knife you made isn't. In fact, Nexon is taking legal action the developers and owners of the original private server that cannot be named or posted on basil thanks to the word filters. Our hoster received a threatening e-mail telling him to immediately take down our servers. We assumed this mail to be fake (which it may still be, but it would fit into the things that happened next) due to the style it was written in and the claim that [you know which] stole Nexon America's code. Of course our hoster did not take any actions after we told him our position on things. We received a bill from the Landgericht (LG) Hamburg which is a German district court about a civil action between NEXON Corporation (which is the Korean parent company) and me. It is a German matter because we and our servers are located in Germany. We are unsure about the compentency of the court since we are over 800 km away from Hamburg (our hoster still more than 600 km) and we do not know of a NEXON Corporation subsidiary in Hamburg. In Germany you have to sue someone at his place of residence or if a tortious act is involved, at the place where the act has been committed. The front of the letter (which you can review in the previous post) basically stated that I had to pay 441,20€ of court costs. The more interesting information can be found on the back where the calculation of the costs is detailed. It can be deduced that there are independent proceedings for the taking of evidence running right now, which are a pre-trial discovery, most likely involving an independent expert. Usually you get informed if such a proceeding is started against you but is possible that it is still in a very early stage. The amount in dispute has been set to 350,000€. This is the amount of money NEXON Corporation is sueing me for. The court costs are calculated based on the amount in dispute and amount to 2,206€ for the independent proceedings for the taking of evidence. According to the bill I had to bear one fifth (441,20€) of those costs. The paragraphs mentioned there are only referring to the laws upon which the calculation is based and don't have anything to do with the claims NEXON Corporation has against us. Since it is quite unusual that you have to pay court costs before even knowing about the case I called the LG Hamburg to ask about the bill. After telling them the file number they immediately apologized and assured me that I don't have to pay anything at the moment. However this did not change the fact that the mentioned proceedings including the amount in dispute are real. Now we received the written confirmation of that telephone call. The letter is pretty much identical to the previous one just with the nullification of the court cost claim. So, what do we know for a fact? • There is a a civil action between NEXON Corporation and me currently in the independent proceedings for the taking of evidence • NEXON Corporation wants 350,000€ • Currently I do not have to pay any court costs. What is happening next? Since we were not directly contacted by NEXON Corporation it is unlikely for this to happen now. We should be informed about the accusation or receive a summons by the court. There is no set time for that. How long will it take? Legal procedures can take a very long time and are barely limited. It may very well take a few months until we get more information, we can't know. It would seem that everything but their blog is down, at least for now. The sourceforge project is also marked as inactive. Why make this. People are still going to play anyway? I know that. I made it because I'm tired of suspending multiple people for talking about and promoting them. So in conclusion... Please do not talk about, encourage, promote, or enable illegal activity on this site. (Rule #6) New Blog: Brawl Friend Code
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