So editing something on a SSD can be illegal, but editing the same thing imported to RAM is legal? That makes literally zero sense.
Why does RAM have different laws applied to it than a Hard Drive?
No, I never said editing the client is illegal. It's not, you can do whatever you want with it. Reverse engineering is completely legal too. Under some jurisdictions, circumventing software protection may be illegal (USA) but there's no such thing in the client. So you can modify the client all you want, as long as you don't redistribute it in its verbatim or modified version. Since you do it on your own computer and in your own RAM, you are definitely not redistributing it.
Also, even if somehow under some weird new RAM-Only Exception law it was allowed to steal and use Copyrighted software as if it was your own.
You're not stealing the software, Cipsoft grants you (and every player) the license to use it every time you download it from their website. Server owners don't use the client at all to run the server.
Using an exact duplicate of Cipsoft's map, NPCs, and monster-names is probably illegal.
Map: It's not actually a duplicate of the map. We have our own items.otb which tie our own server IDs to the client IDs. You could say that we copy client IDs. Well, anybody can right down all the integers in the int32 range. We have our own format for the map: "otbm". If you compared their map byte-by-byte, they would be entirely different. The fact that they might
render to look the same in THEIR own client is a result of how THEIR client works. The server is in fact sending similar bytes to the client as their official game servers. However, those are just numbers - so int32 range again. All the graphics are in the client, we're not sending those. The NPCs again - we haven't copied any code. Copying product "like" may violate a trademark or design patent, but
they don't have any of those on the NPCs nor monsters. Monster names can't be copyrighted - they could be trademarks as well, but they're not.
Hell, even Cipsoft had to change the Beholder to be a Bonelord because the NAME Beholder was copyrighted.
Beholder probably was a trademark. You can't have hold copyright for a word.
You think we can literally make an exact replica of their game and call it our own, and get away with it?
It's definitely not exact replica. It may be similar but as you actually look into what is on client side and what is on server side, you'd notice that nothing is copied on the server side.
There probably exist stupid courts and judges who could rule in favor of
them while being totally oblivious to the technical details of the games, but that shouldn't happen and I hope it won't.