Pottu wrote:As far as I know, no server outside of the USA has been taken down by Blizzard before. This is because the draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that makes it trivial for companies to take down anything they with, with most of the burden of proof on the accused, is naturally only eligible in the US itself. Lawyers are paid by the hour and are expensive, so it was thought that Blizzard would not go through the expense of hiring a French lawyer to drive the case in France. Especially when Nostalrius was not making any money.
But Blizzard did hire a French lawyer who is pursuing us and our service provider through French law, not utilizing the American DMCA one, but simply the French copyright and international trademark laws. This is a major change from previous Blizzard policy and not something that could have been "obviously" foreseen. Especially as nobody in the team expected us to grow this big. I'd like to remind everyone that before launch, we had posters here in the forums predicting 500 players, maybe a peak of 1,000 players if we're lucky. Well, those predictions sure seem ridiculous now - but they weren't ridiculous back then.
So please do not accuse the team of being idiots and cowards. I understand that you're disappointed, frustrated and angry with the server closing, but spewing vitriol on us is not going to improve the situation. Rather, other private server projects should learn the lessons from us - if your server gets popular enough, Blizzard will go after you regardless of your geographical location, regardless of whether you're making money or not, just to protect their trademark and intellectual property.
It was a very big mistake to host the server in France if members of your "team" are also French. Not having a separate entity and no people involved without limited liability is a very big mistake also.
The servers that last are corporations formed in Belize, Panama, Costa Rica, Bahamas, Iceland, and other small nations with loose corporate and banking laws.
When they are actually served papers it really does not matter, they just close shop and move to a new host and new corporation. This is called a shell corporation from the shell game, it is legal and done daily.
The whole thing looks like stupidity and they should have consulted a lawyer before this project.