Private servers: legal or not?

Is it really ilegal to take a game that you can download for free (from them) and then reverse engineering it to a server?
There is a thing tho called "intellectual property", but as far as I know it only prevents you from making money from it.
I googled a lil bit and found this (it's about WOW, but it shuld be the same here):
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=291341
But I also found this article (which is about Maple Story):
http://www.asiaone.com/Digital/News/Story/A1Story20090101-111643.html

So anyone got an answer for it? Which one is it?

As far as I know, NC Soft does not consider illegal the fact that some private servers are using their games. What I know from the period when I was Admin, on different servers, is that illegal is considered the modification of the game. Like custom weapons or stuff like that. Anything that it is not supposed to exist. There was once a rumour (and please consider is at a rumour, i tell what i've heard, not what I know to be exactly) that for different L2 private platforms, there were some people from NC Soft that provided the feed-back, in order to get the skills and everything more realistic.
And besides, do you really think that any developer that works on any L2 Platform (l2Matrix, L2Jserver, L2jFree, L2d and so on) could do anything without their help? Don't think so. That is my opinion.

NCsoft devs might see it as advertisement

Erlien is right. Because, no matter how far you try, you will never have a server that works 100% as official one.

They're trying to get it 100% retail (IA) so it may be close. It may even be the exact same. I doubt it will ever be much of an issue for them since they're making tons of money and we aren't advertising the server site in game, thus stealing their members.

Here is the deal with private servers from my many years of paying on/GMing/running them:

If the server is using an open source emulator, one that has been coded from scratch by an independent group/individual, it is completely 100% legal. If however the server code is:

a) Stolen (as was the case several times for lineage 2)
b) Replicated to the point where the code is identical to that official code.

It become illegal, as copyrighted material is being used without the copyright holders permission. Additionally, if a private server starts charging money for their services, it will be illegal, though an open donation system if fine (unless a profiteering case can be built around a donation system of course).

So a completely custom built server that charges nothing is 100% legal. Though connecting to it technically isn't; this is because users are breaking the legal agreement by using the game client to connect to a source other than the official one. Fortunately, there is no way for a company (NCsoft in this case) to determine whether a client has been used to connect to something other than their own servers, there for making the risk of playing on private servers non existent :3.

Novinha wrote:Here is the deal with private servers from my many years of paying on/GMing/running them:

If the server is using an open source emulator, one that has been coded from scratch by an independent group/individual, it is completely 100% legal. If however the server code is:

a) Stolen (as was the case several times for lineage 2)
b) Replicated to the point where the code is identical to that official code.

It become illegal, as copyrighted material is being used without the copyright holders permission. Additionally, if a private server starts charging money for their services, it will be illegal, though an open donation system if fine (unless a profiteering case can be built around a donation system of course).

So a completely custom built server that charges nothing is 100% legal. Though connecting to it technically isn't; this is because users are breaking the legal agreement by using the game client to connect to a source other than the official one. Fortunately, there is no way for a company (NCsoft in this case) to determine whether a client has been used to connect to something other than their own servers, there for making the risk of playing on private servers non existent :3.

wow thats pretty intense

thans for the info