Penal damages are not legally enforceable, it's only there to scare people and any attempt at using it in a court would simply result in it being declared invalid and unenforceable.
A contract may specify liquidated damages for breaching that contract, but those damages must be within the realm of reasonability for actual damage the breach has caused. You can't insert a clause like that to "punish" someone for breaking the contract, only to recoup damages directly caused by thier breach.
Nexon actually royally screws themselves on their free to play motto here - because if it's free to play MapleStory, how can you can be causing them a loss when there is no monitary expectation expressed in your usage of the service? Unless you were doing something that demonstrably impugned upon thier image, violated their intelectual property, or interrupted their service and therefore it's potential to make money they can't sue you for breaching their ToS because you're not taking any actions that cost them money for them to seek to recover.
The only items I can think of off hand that qualify in the latter criteria there are Denial Of Service attacks, NX Fraud, and possibly widescale disconnect hacks. Running a private server would be illegal because it violates their intelectual property, reverse engineering their proprietary formats wouldn't be illegal in and of itself, nor would packet sniffing them to find out what they're communicating to your machine, or in memory disassembly/debugging to see what their application is doing.
All those are legal and can not directly hurt their profitibility unless you then use the information gained from any of those actions to directly compete with, or hinder, thier operations. Packet Editing would be tampering with transmissions and is subject to local legal rulings.
Also, I should clarify that accessing a private server could not result in suit for damages, only actually running one. This is comparable to a person patronizing a bar that hasn't paid for a performance license for the music it's playing. The bar is culpable for damages because they're not legally entitled to play the music without having licensed it from the recording industry, but the patrons can not also be fined for having heard the music. This is also similar to the legality of downloading pirated music vs distributing pirated music. It's unethical to do so, since it's contributing to an abuse of intellectual property, but the actual crime is making it available, not using it.
A contract may specify liquidated damages for breaching that contract, but those damages must be within the realm of reasonability for actual damage the breach has caused. You can't insert a clause like that to "punish" someone for breaking the contract, only to recoup damages directly caused by thier breach.
Nexon actually royally screws themselves on their free to play motto here - because if it's free to play MapleStory, how can you can be causing them a loss when there is no monitary expectation expressed in your usage of the service? Unless you were doing something that demonstrably impugned upon thier image, violated their intelectual property, or interrupted their service and therefore it's potential to make money they can't sue you for breaching their ToS because you're not taking any actions that cost them money for them to seek to recover.
The only items I can think of off hand that qualify in the latter criteria there are Denial Of Service attacks, NX Fraud, and possibly widescale disconnect hacks. Running a private server would be illegal because it violates their intelectual property, reverse engineering their proprietary formats wouldn't be illegal in and of itself, nor would packet sniffing them to find out what they're communicating to your machine, or in memory disassembly/debugging to see what their application is doing.
All those are legal and can not directly hurt their profitibility unless you then use the information gained from any of those actions to directly compete with, or hinder, thier operations. Packet Editing would be tampering with transmissions and is subject to local legal rulings.
Also, I should clarify that accessing a private server could not result in suit for damages, only actually running one. This is comparable to a person patronizing a bar that hasn't paid for a performance license for the music it's playing. The bar is culpable for damages because they're not legally entitled to play the music without having licensed it from the recording industry, but the patrons can not also be fined for having heard the music. This is also similar to the legality of downloading pirated music vs distributing pirated music. It's unethical to do so, since it's contributing to an abuse of intellectual property, but the actual crime is making it available, not using it.
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