I'm not aware of that sort of going-ons, but private servers will undoubtedly be set-up with or without legal restrictions in place. What loophole are they exploiting in this case?
I don't like sourcing things from Wikipedia, but in this case it's the only source I've got:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online_shard_emulation said:
Shard emulation for Ultima Online got its start during the beta-stage of the game's development in 1996 and 1997, when a program called Ultima Offline eXperiment was released that allowed the players to setup offline servers the game client could connect to. The source-code for version three of this program was released under the GNU General Public License sometime in 1998, which spawned a host of forks, clones and complete reimplementations.
Looking at it now, actually, it seems like it was actually a fan-developed server emulator that predated the DMCA, with no direct involvement from Origin, and only continues to be an issue because of the sheer longetivity and lasting popularity of UO. There was an earlier revision of the same article that gave a different impression.
But I've also read things to the effect of "once open-source, always open-source" - meaning that once something is released under a public license, any subsequent work done to it will still fall into the public domain. There were a couple of other cases where this was supposed to have come into play, most of them software-related. I remember that Freespace 2 was supposed to have fallen afoul of this, with Interplay or Volition being unable to sell the game again once the source code was release...
...which didn't stop them from doing it anyway at full price, at the height of the engine's popularity and internet publicity.
Even Wikipedia agrees with this. So I'm terribly confused in every respect. It's a classic FUD case: everything I'm finding as I look into it points the other way, but because of some dimly remembered hearsay and the potentially devastating consequences I'm terribly nervous.
...On a more productive note, here are the nav maps for what should be all of the Privateer star systems:
*
Clarke Quadrant
*
Fariss Quadrant
*
Humboldt Quadrant
*
Potter Quadrant
Here's the catch (there's always one, isn't there?): they're in MHTML. When I saved them (years ago - it was either with IE or Opera, can't remember), my only thought was for using them as reference to build Reckoning's star maps, and figured that since .mht was so much more compact than using seperate folders-and-files, it wouldn't be an issue. Oh, how wrong I was. I don't feel like going through them and saving them all by hand (they need cropping anyway), so see what you can do with them. There's apparently lots of tools now that can be used to edit .mht files, but with my primary computer undergoing repairs I'm down to one eight-year old laptop in operation, and I don't feel like doing anything particularly adventurous on her.
Oh, one more thing: I didn't make these webpages originally, nor did I take the screenshots. I don't know whether that's an issue or not - I think the original pages died not long after I saved them, and anyway, isn't the art copyright Origin and EA in the first place?