How are private servers allowed to operate without being struck down by copyright infringement or something similar? How was the source code obtained?
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One things nobody has touched on yet are clean room implementations of the games server software. By capturing the network traffic between the games client and server you can reverse engineer what the server must be doing and then write your own server software that does the same thing. Since you aren’t using the original software, and the server isn’t hosting/serving game assets there’s no copyright being infringed upon.
Of course this doesn’t apply to cases where the server software was leaked/stolen, or to cases where the server does in fact serve game assets.
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