NCSoft has nothing to lose by sending a C&D. If I were a betting man, I would put a decent amount of money on them sending a C&D letter to people who hosting servers(at least popular ones). Why wouldn't they?
True enough. They may not want the legal precedents set by going to court over the legality of a server emulator and losing, but they won't really have anything to lose by sending a C&D letter to whoever hosts a server.
You're assuming that anyone is a position to send a C&D would even notice. From what I've heard, NCsoft's U.S. presence is mainly just a skeleton crew of puppets who take and carry out orders from the corporate HQ in Seoul. I'm almost certain that the people in Seoul are willfully ignorant of what's going on with City of Heroes. If
I were a betting man, I'd wager that they are actually actively tuning us out, and even if someone in actual authority got an email saying, "Hey, there's a private server here," they'd hit delete before reading it, just like they've probably done with every other "Hey, the City of Heroes players are [whatever]..." email.
Honestly, there is one guy who I might have been worried about, the guy I dealt with once before regarding some legalities, and he left the company over a year ago. Hell, I don't even know if they even
have legal counsel in the U.S. any more. If you're interested,
you can probably apply for the job, although from the location, it sounds like you'd be representing Carbine, not NCsoft corporate.
My point is that they have the money and power to make life quite miserable for some of us, and if they can't target all of us as a group then they will focus on individuals. That's what the RIAA did. It's what Apple did. I hope you're ready to give whatever support those individuals might need. Not everyone here can afford to be a maverick.
But there are two HUGE differences between NCsoft and the RIAA and Apple: The RIAA and Apple have billions of dollars at their disposal, and more relevantly, the RIAA and Apple went after people who were impacting products on which they are still profiting handsomely. You have to understand that even if NCsoft came after me with every legal gun they have and blew me out of the water with some out-of-this-world multi-million dollar judgment against me, I would immediately declare bankruptcy and start my financial life over. Yeah, it would suck being poor as dirt for a few years while I worked to restore my footing, and yeah, they could temporarily make my life miserable, but really, it's not
that bad and eventually, things would be okay again. It wouldn't affect any non-me people at all, and they'd be paying out the wazoo to go after anyone else.
On the other hand, if they lost, then it would set a legal precedent by which game server emulators could actually be ruled legal. And while I'm not rich and probably don't have the legal muscle that NCsoft does, I'm not exactly poor either and would use every cent I could lay my hands on to get the best legal counsel I could buy to see that such a precedent would be set. If that actually happened--if NCsoft lost their case--it wouldn't just be NCsoft that would be screwed, but a huge chunk of the gaming industry as a whole. I'd be surprised if other gaming publishers didn't step in on my behalf and do whatever they can to keep NCsoft from suing me. Especially since NCsoft is an MMO company (that is, not gaming in general; they don't have any FPSes or single-player RPGs or any other genre to their name), if they lost, it would basically spell financial ruin for them and likely be a bomb exploding in a lot of other powerful industry players.
I cannot tell you how unlikely I think that NCsoft would be willing to risk such a thing,
especially given that the property they'd be suing over is one that they themselves killed off and that, for practical purposes, is worthless right now. Even if a thousand private servers were set up and active, they still get to claim that it's worth $[whatever] on their taxes, which is all that it's good for right now. Yes,
if it makes their radar all the way over in Seoul, they might send a C&D to have a private server shut down. I really kind of doubt that they'd do that. But for them to actually go so far as to try and sue someone? Yeah, I cannot imagine a universe in which that could possibly happen. They would have absolutely nothing to gain from doing so, and they'd be risking their entire business model (and lots of other companys') if they lost. That's why I keep saying that I'm really, really,
really not worried about this contingency.