For anyone who is concerned over "reverse engineering" please understand the legalities of it:
http://lwn.net/Articles/134642/
In a word the illegality of an operation may yield a fully legal product. In the EU it is absolutely possible to reverse engineer as long as you don't publish the product - you can though CHANGE it so that it no longer is the same and publish that.
One of the other issues is it can be also a literary work as it tells stories and has artwork.
The issue could be quite simply a process may be in a grey area that will yield a perfectly fine outcome. Do you want our coders to have to ask NCSoft if what they are doing is fine every step of the way? NCSoft will instantly say no, stop what you are doing and then you will have to sue and prove you are not doing anything illegal. Costing time and money no one wants to spend.
Now here is the fun part - what are the laws it falls under if the coders are multi-national? Also some countries allow complete reverse engineering without a problem and other countries do not.
hmm, different coders under different country laws. I guess, keyword guess, as I havent actually looked it up yet and or asked an actual lawyer, that it would depend on which one they sue. Say you have one in Kazhakistan, one in the US, one in Wyluuni Island somewhere, and one in Canada. Now assuming thye are working on the same project and more than likely there will be a website and or a server that is registered. If registered in a anti-reverse engineer, then it probably would fall under that jurisdiction. Now, lets say it's registered in Wyluuni Island where anything goes. Then the website and server would be safe but if the company wanted to be d-wads about it, they probably could still go after the citizens taht are part of the country that honors the anti-reverse engineering law. The kicker I see with that is, that would mean more than likely even in worse case, the server will remain in Wyluuni Island and given that just about any country part of the world wide web is accessible, then it probably could still be played on. On the same token though it may not show up on US version Google and equivalent search either way.
Now, lets say it is an illegal act to reverse engineer ins two out of four countries and the server is safe in Wyluuni island. Now, unless the two that fall into the anti-reverse engineering countries are millionaires, more than likely the company wont bother suign for monetary damages. How ever, in copyright laws there are provisions that said a person can actually go to jail even under Contributary infringement More than likely they will be issues a C&D to cease, then get sued. They go to court and more than likely the judge will tell them to knock it off. Although even if they knock if off the server is still protected in Wyluuni Island and ran by the other two. Now if the two where the law is in effect decide "to hell with the judge, I'm doing this for the right reason" and continue, then there is provisions under the copyright infringement laws that allow up to five years in prison which is rare but does happen from time usually not for full 10 unless they go in there saying "hey judge, I screwed your mother last night and she liked it." But nonetheless that is still a criminal record, a white collar crime, but criminal record nonetheless that can affect them for a while. But over all, the private server will still run.
And that is assuming each person is actual citizen of their respective country as while enforcement of the US copyright laws apply to generally US citizens, the US do honor the copyright of other nations, a lot of other nations.
Nations that US is not in copyright relations with are Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Palaua, Nauru, San Marino, Turkmenistan, Somalia, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Although setting up a server from many of those countries is no cake walk and probably copyright would be the least of the worries.
10 common myths (11 actually) about copyright.
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.htmlI think 11 is important here for this case. Especially the commercial value of the IP and if there is nothing to be one, yeah only the most vindictive companies would bother and the courts dont look too kindly on that BUT they dont look too kindly on vindictive defendants either. Which honestly notot be mean, surrounding this secret project, it's very vindictive feeling. Yet, I think as time go on, the actual reason can be softened to be more reasonable later down the line just in case the fit hits the shan.