I agree with Tuk.

Me too.

Legal action to remove freeshards=long and expensive with no real benefit gained or increased revenue at the end of it.

I don't know of any free shards using any UO name. They all make up their own.

The code for the emulated servers are all non-profit and written from scratch with no code taken from EA. On top of this almost all are released under a GPL which prevents charging to play on them so they are not competing with EA for any revenue. Now some do sell items similar to the UO Store EA has, but it's to help with hosting costs which is legal under a GPL. All and all there are no Illegal action in hosting one from that end. And as far as the EULA goes, shrink wrapped contracts are something that usually don't hold water in court as your are often not allowed to read the contents until after you open the box, or install the service which means they are trying to bind you before listing the restrictions.

Also the TOS and EULA have changed, many programs would fall under a grandfather clause since the changes restricting them were amendments placed after their initial development, you can't charge someone for doing something illegal when at the time of the action it was legal. For others they are in countries here EULA and TOS contracts and Copyright laws don't exist, in those cases there is simply nothing to be done.

Good answer Nexus - I like the cut of your jib!

Perhaps one or maybe two free servers are written entirely from scratch, but a large majority of them are using the actual EA UO client with some modifications.

Not true
The actuall software/emulator that people connect to, supposedly, is written from scratch
I believe that, because it's written in a language which didn't exist when UO was created (C#).
All the information the creators needed to make an emulator, are freely available on Stratics and other sources (calculations and whatnot)
The emulator itself, does need a copy of UO installed to work from, in paticular it needs the files for the items, maps and static content in the worlds
Problem is, the client is freely downloadable, it doesn't require any acceptance of any EULA's or anything like that, which I find odd.

The client part only comes in to play from the user perspective, they download UO, install it, then run a third party application which lets them connect to free shards.
I don't know precisely how it does that, but I assume it modifies the IP/port in memory, so people can connect to a freeshard, but I also believe it modifies the encryption of the client that's loaded into memory.

Plus, the TOS/EULA only apply if you register an account with EA
There is no EULA/TOS to sign or agree to when installing the client software itself.

Alot depends specifically on what free server your using.

Hmm.. Well all I know is that last year my work was gonna do a freeshard for a ad. Spaced out ad for a big very known computer company. But we couldnt because we would break some laws by doing it. We did research into it back then.

It was the client people use to connect to the shard that would be a violation... But there is a free non UO client now... it sucks but it does work.. But that made us change our idea to Second Life.

Not all emulation software is written in C# just what has become the dominate one.

Also you have to look at this point, I was reading a while back on how popular Emulation for UO actually is.

While EA currently has what, around 25-50k subscriptions? There are several hundred emulated shards running, and an estimated 1 million individual players on them.

I've heard of a few that EA Devs have played on from time to time, now I look at free shards in the light that, if they are so popular overall vs. EA's servers, then maybe the additions that people are doing, are part of the reason. While I don't play Free Shards, I do keep track of and read through the forums of one of the most popular emulation software packages. You'd be amazed how often I've seen someone release system, that a few months later is released on EA's servers. The emulation community is a free think tank for the developers to see what people like.

Right on the spot.