VMK private servers to be legal?

[Unregistered]

I've read that VMK is going to close soon, and that this has upset many players. I've never played VMK, but I've seen a fair share of online games being shut down.

Anyways, a long time ago, I heard about a law that makes it legal to emulate (or create private servers of) any online game that is no longer active. Is this true? If so, maybe an experienced programmer could reverse engineer the VMK client and make some sort of private server.

I somewhat doubt that the law is real, though. After all, Disney would still own the rights to the game data.

 

[WWEDUDE]

Well, someone is making a similar game (vmkv2.com), but most of the game is copyrighted, for example all the lands are copyrights of Disney, etc.

 

[centurythree]

Anyways, a long time ago, I heard about a law that makes it legal to emulate (or create private servers of) any online game that is no longer active. Is this true? If so, maybe an experienced programmer could reverse engineer the VMK client and make some sort of private server.

Sorry, that sounds like wishful thinking. I can't even imagine what the incentive would be to create such a statute, and how much of an uproar there would be from the gaming industry if it were seriously proposed.

Then when you get into the copyright issues around each individual game element and image . . . you see where this is going.

 

[wilde_oscar]

there are reports that several of the sites that are clamoring to fill the void are a scam of some sort, let the buyer beware.

 

[Toxicity]

Well, theres nothing they can do about private servers, and i play runescape private servers, all the runescape company does is get mad.. its not illegal in the first place. and my friend could probably make a private server