in mother russia.. oh wait, whatever
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in mother russia.. oh wait, whatever
Reverse engineering or capturing game packets may violate a ToS but I've yet to see a legally binding ToS. And in the event that you do violate it, the worst they can claim is that you were illegally copying their game. But that copying can be seen as "fair use," as it has been in every court case in which it has been tried, they can't even sue you for any money with the precedent we have. Hosting an emulator for people to connect to doesn't cause legal issues unless that game is P2P. At worst, if they claimed ToS violations for everyone, they'd have to file an independent lawsuit against every user and would only receive something like $200 per user, but those lawsuits would cost far more. And none of this is criminal copyright violation, so nobody would even have a tiny risk of going to jail, just being sued.
And it was probably moved to russia due to the fact that every company on the planet will send a C&D or a DMCA without any legal basis. Glider got taken out from Blizzard but on appeal, almost nothing was lost. Big companies -> big money -> big lawsuits -> still can't win. Whoops.
They don't care about their copyrighted material, they care about control. Look at the battle net emulator that got shut down.
bnetd - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
They explicitly asked Blizzard to let them interface with their servers to authenticate users. The goal was to provide a higher quality bnetd because Blizzard's sucks ass (still does, always has, never gonna change). Blizzard denied the request. To let legitimate customers use a better service. Yep, that's how it goes.