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Simple question: What are your opinions on <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware">abandonware</a>?<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
(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 :-) ).<br>
<br>
Andrew<br>
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