# A note from crystall1nedev about legality
Hello, everyone. My name is Eva Isabella Luna, and I am the current project lead and one of the founders of the AngelAuraMC team. I'd like to share some thoughts on something we get a lot: is Amethyst legal, is it safe, and is it secure?
# Is Amethyst legal?
One of the founding prinicples for AngelAuraMC is to stay within Microsoft's EULA and any applicable laws for the developers. The reason that I fought so hard for this goes back to late 2021, with a story that I have never properly told. Until now.
# Preface
I'd like to begin by stating a fact: Piracy is illegal in the judisdictions for all current AngelAuraMC members. This wasn't the case with PojavLauncherTeam, and perhaps that created a bit of a divide. I'm not sure, and I don't try to assume.
I'd like to state another fact: I don't mind piracy. I genuinely do not have a problem with it - and I've done my fair share, and will probably continue to. There's times where the ill effects of piracy are outweighed by the drawbacks of abiding the law, and there's a lot of content that you just cannot acquire without pirating anyway. (I'll still think you're a douche for pirating from indies, though.)
However, there's a limit: If piracy endangers something I value, I will try my best to prevent it. That situation is exactly why AngelAuraMC was formed.
# Microsoft v Eva
Rolling back to Thanksgiving of 2021, my mother received an email from our ISP. She forwarded it to my dad and I, and it looked like your regular-old "you torrented without a VPN" email that you can laugh off. However, it was... a little more than that.
That email was accompanied by another - a cease and desist from Microsoft's legal department about PojavLauncher iOS packages hosted on my server at home. To this day, I'm not comfortable sharing the email itself - that's not something you "just do" even if you didn't sign any agreements, especially when lawyers are involved. I never got confirmation that I could, so I won't.
Needless to say, there was a lot of back-and-forth between my lawyers and theirs, myself and their lawyers and representatives, etc cetera. What ended up happening was:
- I needed to remove iOS .debs with offline mode from my server
- We needed to remove iOS .debs with offline mode from GitHub releases and actions
- We needed to remove offline mode code in both clients
It was perceived as "the easy way" because this avoided the toll of a repository takedown - or worse. And since that day, I advocated for PojavLauncher to drop offline mode support. While I was not project manager at the time, I didn't want to bring The Wrath Of Microsoft™️ on any of the other developers.
Things looked good after we had a fix in place, and Microsoft was neutral towards us after that. But stuff happened, and it didn't pan out the way any of us had hoped. So instead, we decided to form a new organization built on new principles - one of which was ensuring that AngelAuraMC's projects never enable the ability to pirate Microsoft or Mojang software, and always abide by the EULAs set forth by both of them.
And now that I am the project manager, I will ensure this stays the case. None of my developers should ever feel worried that their work can be taken down in an instant, or that they will receive notices in the mail that they have only a few days to comply before charges are pressed.