On Fri, 2007-08-06 at 08:19 +1200, Glen Ogilvie wrote: > I don't know what the legal status is for distributing those old dos games, > although I would install quite a few if they were available. I recently
In most cases, it's illegal in most countries. As I stated initially, 'abandonware' is a concept with no legal recognition. Copyright is valid for the entire period defined by law (which is at least several decades in most jurisdictions); it does not matter at all whether or not the entity that owns the copyright is no longer distributing the software, no longer cares, or has been merged into a breakfast cereal manufacturer: the copyright is still valid and breaching it is still illegal. Games which have been specifically released into the public domain by their original copyright owners are a different case entirely and are not 'abandonware'. They're also very rare. -- adamw -- adamw _______________________________________________ PLF-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://www.zarb.org/mailman/listinfo/plf-discuss
