Is Abandonware Piracy?

from the greedy-companies dept

Mon, Jan 21st 2002 12:18am — Mike Masnick

A Wired News article looking at the popularity of abandonware sites. These are websites that offer downloads of old software that is no longer sold anywhere. It's not hard to figure out where the legal questions start to come up, but the supporters of abandonware say they're obviously not pirating anything. Since no company is even selling the product, they're certainly not taking any money away from a company. However, companies that have plans to rerelease certain programs (mostly games) don't always see things that way.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

3 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

msykes, 21 Jan 2002 @ 5:57pm

Seems like a good thing
This seems like something that companies could turn into a good thing. If nobody is selling the game (or whatever) I think it makes sense to allow it to be downloaded. Then companies could actually use these sites to gauge interest in their old software... and rerelease the most popular items. When they commit to rerelease they could then ask the sites to remove those downloads, since it would then be piracy.

Wishful thinking naturally.'

msykes
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- xiaoeee, 3 Jan 2018 @ 8:40pm
  
  Re: Seems like a good thing
  There is no reason to host abandonware. No reason at all. Every copyright for every software should be respected, even the software that is discontinued. And freeware in fact should also be illegal, cuz money rockz and rollz, hahaha (:
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
xiaoeee, 3 Jan 2018 @ 8:38pm

Just give up abandonware. There are a lot of the software being made these days. Give up your nostalgia and enjoy new games. And if they don't work on your machine, just give up and get over it. There are a lot of other ways to entertain yourself.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]