[bytehowl]

To my knowledge they are fully reverse-engineered, which makes Blizzard occasionally going after servers for piracy even more infuriating.

[tmp_anon_22]

All the assets are usually pirated in private servers. Its very illegal and makes it difficult to host them from most countries.

[hgazx]

Even if the code is completely new, you need a lot of copyrighted material to run a wow server.

[KptMarchewa]

Isn't the copyrighted material in game client itself? Did WOW stream content back then?

[hgazx]

Positions and names of NPCs, quest texts, encounter mechanics, texts said by NPCs, I think item names (not completely sure), etc are all stored in the server and are sent over the wire to the player from the server. That’s quite clearly a copyright violation.