If Horizon Had A $1 Monthly Fee

This I can actually agree with. If a third party is *actively profiting* from SE's IP whilst SE is still in business and wants to protect that IP then they'd have much more of a case to stand on, even outside the US.

However if there is no profit involved then it'd basically just be a case of SE complaining that "if people who legally bought our client software choose to point it towards a different service provider then that server provider can handle requests from the client and make it to do certain things that we originally programmed it to do". The private servers don't reuse propietary server code, nor do they break or interfere with the client SW in any way. And to my knowledge they contains no assets that most courts in the world would consider "copyrighted material". Reverse engineering has been a thing for much longer than FFXI has been around, and there's a lot of global legal precedent for allowing it; SE are also on much shakier ground for FFXI than Blizzard were for WoW due to the lack of a subscription requirement for the FFXI game client even if they start pointing at the TOS/EULA (which is typically not legally enforcable).

I'd 100% have issues with distributing pirated copies of the FFXI client. But as long as people purchase a legal copy of the client, they then have the option of subbing retail (supported, TOS/EULA OK) or playing private (against the TOS/EULA, but so is Windower/Ashita and if SE want to start going after end-users for EULA violations it'll be a huge waste of their already scant resources). People don't need to subscribe to keep the client operational; thanks in part to the cludge that is PlayOnline.

The only reason they'd care about PS crossing the money line is this: once it's not easily classified as some fan project for fun, the matter of defending their trademarks comes into play, which they cannot/will not ignore. It's a bright red line (at least in the US), that they'd have to act on, unless they wanted to weaken their ability to enforce XI's trademarks on anything else.

They are still two separate things, you are discussing emulating of the hardware, which is not the same thing as what is happening here.

Emulating hardware is creating the execution environment for the binaries/games/firmware/etc to run. That's a separate issue from the game code itself, because you can emulate the hardware or execution environment and argue you weren't touching the game assets at all, same as you mention with the firmware. Much of the architecture is going to be based on publicly available data (ISAs, basic hardware concepts, etc), so it can be 'clean roomed' in the way you talk about above and largely avoid (or have an argument you avoided) touching any proprietary data in an illegal way.

The private FFXI servers aren't emulated, the execution environment doesn't matter, and you aren't emulating the original server under a different execution environment like you are in the above case. It's a server software entirely rewritten and derived from reverse engineering the client and there are numerous cases of this situation being shut down via C&D. I suppose you could argue that creating the server is creating the environment for the client to run, but IMO that's kinda shaky technically and legally. Either way, this is not emulation, it's a server software derived from reverse engineering and that's a separate thing.

i agree with this.

i just think the reality is horizon will not get to the point where they are making enough for SE to care. SE is a big company. SE does not care a whole lot about ffxi.

if they have 4000 active users and charge $1 per month SE is not going to care about $4000. if horizon got to 100,000 active users and charged $13/month, then yes, SE would absolutely do something.

the intelligent thing, if you're horizon and want to make money, is to do something extra weird and charge for that.

for example, make a paid app that ties into linkshell chat on horizon for your phone. SE could still likely take action here but it shifts it even further into a grey area since you aren't barring access to the game for that $1/month.

the above likely won't happen though since most of the coders on horizon are just lua editors and this would require a few weeks of active development by professionals to get right

There is no legal distinction between the two, in the US at least, is what I'm telling you. It's all treated as art and machinery, covered by the 1st amendment. Everything else you just said was noise. I'm here instructing you how this works because I live in the emulation community, which includes emulating MMO servers so that the game stays alive.

The LSB is code written to emulate an FFXI server, this is 100% legal and is done all the time. Specifically it's emulating how the POL / FFXI servers respond to client requests. It is perfectly legal to create something that mimics another thing or interacts with another thing without the consent of the original things creator. Adapters and third party OEMs do this every single day.

What is unlawful is using someone else's IP without their consent, in this case the users using the FFXI client without a license to do so. It is also unlawful to encourage or otherwise assist others with breaking the law. The Horizon team providing instructions for how to bypass SE's restrictions on using their client in an unlicensed way is a good example of this.

Oh internet wise-man, please educate me.


Yes, I know. We, the users do have do not have the rights to freely use or share the assets made by SE. For personal use, however, the users are likely in the clear. Subverting the FFXI client to connect to a private server is likely to be against ToS\EULA as well.

None of that has to do with the legality of an FFXI private server.

I also acknowledged that the story line and quest can be a problem if they are stored server side.

Code / Software is treated as art with 1st amendment protections, at least in the US. So writing emulators is completely legal as long as they are "original works", meaning no copying someone else's art without a license to do so. Derivative works are a bit different and more an issue in the OSS world, with non-OSS it's a straight nope.

Now the client, those assets and binaries are owned by SE, and it doesn't matter the method of distribution, it's still art owned by SE. Just become someone publicly displays a piece of art doesn't give the public the right to copy and reuse that art. without permission from the artist. The Horizon users who are downloading SE's property then using that property without a license are most certainly breaking the law. If the Horizon staff are encouraging or assisting with people on how to download SE's property and use it without a license, they are also breaking the law.

Right now SE could drop a DMCA hammer onto Horizon staff and scrub it off the face of the planet, they could do the same to any Horizon user as well. They won't because it's just too much effort for little to no return and their lawyers have bigger things to do. Now if Horizon staff were to attempt to charge a fee for the privilege of stealing SE's art, that is a whole other can of works and SE's lawyers would be required to drop that hammer if for no other reason then to protect their claim to ownership.

BTW this is where the category of "abandonware" comes from, if someone is publicly stealing your property but you do not defense it, then it can be declared abandoned property.

Anyhow, sorry for the longish post, it's just a very weird and US-centric area of law. Anyone who's in the emulation community knows they have to do this dance where they make a functional system while not stealing or encouraging others to steal a companies property.

What's to emulate? This just sounds like standard IEEE TCP/IP connectivity.

best phrase related to this scenario I've ever seen: "code is seen as the same as art in the US". That's really all that needs said regarding the differences between personal use and for-profit use.

This falls under reverse engineering not emulation.

The ffxi client/server protocol is proprietary and was reverse engineered using the retail client.

Reverse engineering retail software for non-interoperability purposes is illegal in many countries.

This is the part I'm not understanding, and this is likely just ignorance on my part, but how is defining port/protocol pairs for any given application something that's proprietary? I get some black box appliances don't disclose this information, but I've never heard of that information being legally protected either.

It's the application layer data. For instance position packets, packets triggering actions, triggering events, etc. All of that is specific to FFXI and is transmitted by the client over tcp/udp/whatever. It's defined by SE and parsed by the client/server once the data is handed off to those processes. You have lower level protocols handling things like routing, ordering, scheduling, etc but the payload data carried by those protocols to the client<->server is specific to FFXI and defined by SEs devs. At one point someone posted a doc detailing the structure of this data somewhere, but I can't recall where it is. That's all not standardized data like TCP/IP/UDP/etc are.

I'm still not convinced this is as settled legally as Saevel is indicating, though. There's no way to "clean room" reverse engineer software like you can some hardware and everything I could find on the Cyrix case (which is admittedly little) was wrg to Intel trying to charge royalties on patents twice, nothing regarding emulation or ISA (admittedly there were a multitude of cases and details are scant). Even if it was, Intel has continued making legal threats about portions of the x86 ISA up until a few years ago. I have a hard time believing there isn't an argument that these protocols and data structures aren't considered SE IP, so they can be freely reverse engineered and reimplemented without potential consequence, but I doubt we'll ever see that in a court case solely because of the cost. He's also right this happens a lot in other instances, so why sometimes it gets shutdown and sometimes it doesn't isn't really clear to me.

Either way, projects like this have been shut down before and likely will again, whether SE takes enough effort to do is another story. They don't seem to care enough to do so, but it has happened with other projects, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. It's also possible that the SE legal team simply isn't aware or it escaped their radar and no one within SE has pointed it out, knowing corporate legal teams, it seems unlikely they'd let it slide if they knew about it regardless of what Fujito/et al say.

Lot of lawyers in this thread.

Don't need to be a lawyer to know tech.

I'm not a lawyer, but you can't spend a lot of time in the open source community without acquiring at least a working understanding of copyright/copyleft/trademarks/licensing and how they apply to technology.

I mean, you can, and people do, but they tend to run into trouble. I had to explain to one VP of Engineering very early in my career why we couldn't just copy the Linux kernel

First company I worked for did that very thing and had to do a bunch of compliance stuff after they got caught, was a huge ordeal since it happened across a lot of products and they had to stand up this compliance team to deal with it going forward.

I got told to stop asking questions when I asked what they did about LKMs...

still boggles the mind that we're focused so hard on a legality agreement. i think people are just relatively insecure and want to be able to flex over the private server crowd that "SE could shut u down lol." it's incredibly cringe

the way FFXIAH pulls data from the game is also not sanctioned by SE and they could get a C&D as well.

is it likely that ffxiah gets a C&D? no. not at all.

is it likely that horizon as long as they aren't making millions gets a C&D? no. not at all.

Again from a legal point of view, it's the same thing. No amount of hand waiving or twenty dollar words change how the US legal system treats software.


The server is emulating a FFXI server for SE's client. Horizon (and other PS's) use the retail client and because SE doesn't have any sort of PS support built-in, they need to convince the client it's connecting to real FFXI server infrastructure.

People seem to think "emulation" is only for hardware, that is incorrect. Emulation is anytime you present one thing as something it is not. When SE's FFXI client connects to it's server, it's expecting it to be a SE POL / FFXI server. The LSB pretends to be a FFXI server by emulating both the network interfaces and how it treats the data being presented. When the FFXI client requests a zone ID, the LSB presents it with a valid zone ID in the structure the client is expecting, instead of sending it an equipment structure instead.

Now if the folks over at Horizon, or the contributors to the LSB, wrote their own FFXI client that used a different or modified set of structures and protocols, then it wouldn't be emulation.

Regardless, none of that matters because in the USA this is all 100% legal. There is no such thing as "vendor only communication protocol", as much as vendors like to pretend they are. The vendor can claim it's documentation and specifications are trade secrets and make people sign NDA's to look at them, but if someone outside comes around and figures out how to work with it, then they can use what they wrote. The entire OSS community is built on the foundation of people doing exactly this, Wine BS's the Microsoft DLL's into thinking they are being loaded on a real Microsoft system.

I can't speak for other countries, but as I said before, in the USA software and code is treated identically to art. The LSB is a separate and non-derivative work from SE's own FFXI / POL server code. The fact that it happens to successfully interact with the FFXI Client is irrelevant to the legal argument of it being illegal. If you painted a picture of a tree and three flowers, and someone else painted a similar painting but with a different tree and flowers, you can't claim they are stealing your intellectual property.

That's more a question of resources. This is all civil court stuff, so each side must pay for it's own legal fee's / court costs. Most small projects do not have the financial resources to actually fight a protracted court case, which is why those large Open Source Foundations are so important. When a big company sends you a C&D letter, it's a hard decision to try to go up against them. Even if you could eventually win, the legal costs would kill you. The only way to "win" is to get a successful motion to dismiss early before discovery and the crazy court costs kick in. This is why everyone in the OSS is very careful about how they write anything that goes near a proprietary piece of software. Lots of well documented adapters and emulators are used as interface layers to ensure nobody is doing anything that can be misconstrued as IP theft.

Oh and under no circumstance should anyone ever use anything that looks like a trademark.

Definitely no lawyer, but as has been said, its hard not to pick up at least a basic understanding of what not to do in certain industries that face these issues.

End of the day, private server folk have to live with they're abusing the work and ingenuity of others to "create" nothing, but simply "mimic" creation. And that has limits to what one can do once money gets involved. You're essentially misusing others' talents- there's no denying it by trying to dance around phrasing.

Yall mother *** must be bored as *** to be talking about this ***man

to be honest- I love talking this kind of ***. You play enough concerts with copyrighted music and dance that line of "free to the public" vs "paid appearance" or "educational use" and it gets really hazy, and thus a fun conversation.

Kinda surprised to see the tech bros think its not that clear cut- I always assumed that fellow coders were as protective of their community as musicians were.

lolno

That's pretty broad. Sounds more like spoofing than emulation to me but /shrug.

This is nothing wrong with creating software that preforms like other software. The devs behind the PS software are absolutely creating new software. Unless they somehow got a hold of the source code for SEs FFXI servers, they cannot be abusing the dev work of SE for servers.

I find it a bit weird to dismiss the work, that goes into software like this, by claiming they are creating nothing.

they're not aiming to make "software perform like other software" and building from the ground up. They are using the creative resources client-side that SE created and using that as the basis for all maps, mobs, gear, and other aspects. There is zero creation happening there, just copying the works of others. Even if they wrote it from the ground up completely to mimic FFXI, there still would be zero creation- plenty of work, that I do not doubt, and i respect the work...just don't fool yourself into thinking its "creating" anything.

If the argument is they are "creating" the server-side information that is unavailable to us directly as simple players, I'm still not convinced, but I am not as versed in this industry as others. But to me, once you steal the client side info to make your own playground, you have given up any right to claim "I made this"....you photocopied it.

At best, this feels like an artist sampling the tracks of another artist in their "original work". And the artist doing the sampling still pays the original musician.

It's open to interpretation and people tend to lean towards whatever interpretation fits their biases. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone here, because I do the same thing.

The LKM example above, which I half joked about, is another more publicly discussed example. At the time, the company I worked for believed they could load and link kernel modules without GPL licensing the module (distributed in binary form without the source). That's a view held by many and obviously benefits them, as well as many companies (Nvidia for instance). Meanwhile, many maintainers would say otherwise, that the module is a derived work from the kernel since it uses symbols/headers/hooks/etc and must be GPL licensed(this is obviously my simplistic understanding of the situation). I've seen some take this as far as saying even userspace libraries licensed under GPL can't be imported without the application using them being GPLed as well. It's not clear, it was (maybe still is, I haven't been paying attention) debated for years, people still distribute binary only modules, and AFAIK still hasn't been settled on in court. The answer on what the rule is will depend on who you talk to and what their interpretation is. There may be a lot of people doing something that's technically 'illegal', but it's never been ruled on so there's no authoritative source of what is and isn't allowed.

I think you'll find the same thing here until it's ruled on one way or another, which will probably never happen. There are a lot of different interpretations you could take and it's muddy.


Spoofing usually involves pretending to be an identity (IP address, username, etc), what's happening here is the protocols used by the server/client are implemented by the private server to host the content. Spoofing would be if they presented their servers as the actual retail servers (e.g. using some kind of DNS or ARP attack, for instance) and tricked people to connect to them unknowingly.

They're 'recreating' a bunch of copywritten material.

We obviously have a different definition of creation.

Gotta do something to pass the time while waiting for Sortie and Odyssey timers count down.