From what I can tell, that's the main reason the emulator efforts are being held under wraps - given NCsoft's reaction to Tabula Rasa servers, it's a fair guess they'll do the same to CoH. Unless they decide that a CoH emulator would work to the detriment of official competition in the form of TPP.
Either way, odds are they'll be playing it safe until it's too late to suppress the developed code.
Yup.
Hopefully they have a very intensive knowledge of how to cover their tracks for the people that let it go and those that spread it.
In this day and age everything can be tracked and traced to point of origin, even proxies are not safe bet as they even store the actual IP address as it enter their server. More of a just in case matter because they may not even take it any further or bother.
And there isn't many countries that isn't in IP treaty with the US in some way or fashion.
And many of those that are not, a private server and a lawsuit is the least of the worries if they manage there.
People may speed and get away with it even though it's illegal but it probably wouldn't be wise to go to the court house every day and say you been booking through a school zone doing 100mph. Even though they probably wont or cant arrest you then, it does put a spotlight on ya. and can come back to bite when ya if ya get caught.
Which reminds me of something happened around here about 4 years ago. There was this flea market and of course you have your standard bootleg dvd sales guys there. Many been selling bootlegs since the days of VHS. One day, this guy walked to the booth and asked "Are you selling these." and not suspecting anything the bootleg dvd guy went through his usual speech of good quality, cheap, wont be disappointed. The guy replied "oh really? You're under arrest. You havea right to remain silent..." and before anyone knew the guy was being hauled away in handcuffs. Apparently the guy that inquired was an undercover. bootleg guy spent 1.5 years in jail. On top of that, the owner of the flea market got sued. Ended up losing $250,000 not including lawyer fees. After a hit like that he ended up closing the market. Eventually the land got razed and they built a walmart in it's place. Legend has it Walmart was behind the entire thing as they been wanting to buy that property for ages and the flea market guy refused to sell. The point is the bootlegger been getting away with it for years, many bootleggers came and gone without once getting caught but that day, that time, that one time, he got caught. To this day I still see him roaming the street because he cant even get a job with record now in the field he know. Sales. He cant go to school because he has no more money to learn a new field.