Zengar

There absolutely is grey ownership. While it is NOT applicable in this situation, and is frequently misused, "squatter's rights" is an example. In jurisdictions that have some variant of that, Individuals residing in abandoned properties can become the owners thereof if the "real owners" cannot be located. In the city where I live, the city council has been similarly taking ownership of properties where there has been no responses to attempts at communication (including a lack of property taxes paid) for more than 5 years. Between when you think that a property has been abandoned and when you legally confirm that to be the case its ownership is "grey". If you are wrong and the property has not been abandoned, you are in legal trouble. If you are right, you are free and clear. Here we are dealing with intellectual property rather than physical property, and more importantly the owner hasn't gone away. However, they also haven't done ANYTHING with it for the better part of a decade and the intricacies of copywrite and/or trademark law leave a lot of grey areas and the end result is similar: If you want to stay "safe" don't touch "abandoned" stuff. If you are willing to take the risk then you are going to have the possibility of a cease-and-desist order hanging over your head. If it actually is abandoned then you will never actually receive that cease-and-desist order and you're fine. Otherwise, you better stop infringing as soon as you receive it. Based on the fact that there have been several mentiones of people having reached out to NCSoft, my guess would be that NCSoft doesn't want to give an official okay because then they would be accepting a degree of liability and would have a harder time going after anyone who tried to make money off of this. On the other hand, the addition of this User agreement suggests that they have given an unofficial "as long as you do this, this, and this and don't do this we won't hit you about the head and shoulders with the DMCA."