[game_preservation] Abandonware

[Andrew Armstrong]

Simple question: What are your opinions on abandonware 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware>?

My reason for asking is two fold; firstly, the Internet Archive does 
have a current legal right to work on preserving abandoned games hosting 
the material in a private archive (I have, however, no idea how this can 
be ever accessed, hehe), so I was going to investigate this side, which 
is more legal.

On the other side, we have a multitude of sites which are providing 
downloads of old games (sometimes with a lot of additional information) 
- some, rarely, are actually legal to distribute, while most are in 
copyrighted or in legal limbo. Apart from the most popular licences, 
most are dead and buried - the companies who made the games no longer 
exist, and much of the time there is no one to even ask about the IP.

I'd rather like to cover this area, despite it's grey legal area, rather 
then ignore it. This would only mean some more news articles where 
relevant and a listing of the relevant sites in our links directory, and 
possibly more information if I got around to researching it past what 
Wikipedia has. It might also influence future projects, who knows what 
we'll do.

Thanks for anyone's opinions on this, and of course, Henry really has 
the last say on if we'll cover it but I wanted a discussion regardless.

(Also I want more activity here since it's really good, and there's a 
lot more I should be putting up on this list, and a lot more I think 
others could put up if they thought it was worth discussing :-) ).

Andrew
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