Software Piracy, Abandonware and Today’s Messed up Copyright Laws
I was browsing in the Defacto2.net document archive of the PC scene and found a reference to an interesting article written by Stephen Granade titled “Warez, Abandonware, and the Software Industry“.The article discusses in detail the subjects software piracy, copyright with a few on it from a perspective of a new type of software piracy called “Abandonware”.Abandonware provides access to games that are old, out of print and not supported anymore by the software company who created it or owns the copyright. It provides multiple functions; one of which is to provide support for rightful owners of the software to get a replacement, if their copy was damaged or the disk where it was stored on is not readable anymore. It also provides people access to historic games that cannot be acquired legally anymore, since they are not being sold anymore. The third function is to provide current game designers with an archive to study how other game designers in the past worked and how they did things that worked or not.Abandonwares sites often provide also the means to play the old games, especially if they are for hardware platforms that are also unavailable today, such as Apple II, Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, Super NES and other old Nintendo consoles, Sega consoles, old Sony Playstations, Atari game consoles and home computers. This means are emulator programs for modern computers (mostly Windows PC) that emulate the old hardware platform and load old game code to run on your computer. Even old[…]
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