That's why I said "and the Turtle WOW thing", because that will be where things start getting spicy. M$FT's money and owned congress critters will absolutely get anything a judge decrees sent out immediately. DBG's success here is just the opening salvo. It reiterates what should have been common sense, you don't make money off someone else's IP without a license, with the force of law behind it. Our trade agreements and treaties for the past 100+ years have had copyright bullshit baked into them. A call to shut down emulated servers will be globally enforced by any and all countries that don't want an international trade dispute with the US, and it will be done damn near immediately. Every country has their ISPs by the balls in the name of national security, as they should. Government says 'block these IPs' or 'turn down the fiber to X country' and the ISPs will immediately comply.
This is something of a personal and professional thing for me. If you were around during the Napster stuff and the DMCA you had all of this front and center for a few years. I now also have 20+ years working in telecomm, including quite a few years now working in the network infrastructure and the legal adjacent teams that deal with requests from LEAs and MAFIAA lawyers. The US has done the work to enact our own version of the Great Firewall of China at the drop of a hat. Every country in Europe and Asia has done the same. Every single one of those countries that wants their copyrights to mean a damn thing is going to play ball once the emulated servers get called out. This isn't going to be passion project devs vs copyright owners. It is going to be the black market vs the coordinated efforts of multiple governments and every ISP that wants to stay in business in those countries.
THJ being the start of this is amusing, because it's EQ related. In a better universe copyright laws wouldn't exist at this point, because the reality of technology and the internet have made them utterly irrelevant. I am not a fan of the Disney distortion that has copyrights existing for 95 years instead of going into public domain after 14 years as it was when the Constitution was ratified. EQ should be in the public doman by now. But it's not, and won't be in our lifetimes unless some really rich philanthropist buys it out and specifically makes it so. Still rooting for the THJ team to turn over all the $$$ and get a settlement that doesn't fuck them over.
