That they are huh. I used to remember (very old times) when the website started to like malfunction and I really didn't want an account for downloading the games. Wow! I wish their last update would have been more recent but it is alive.

Bakubaku is so hard.

Also..Damn it Taito, sell some PC classics in GOG, I would gladly take out my wallet.

That's the part where you're actually wrong legally speaking, it's not their "property" despite the misnomer "intellectual property". We, the public, trade a limited time monopoly on distributions of creative works to the authors or they wouldn't have it at all. If an author wants their work to disappear they literally should never share it with anyone, that's the only way to make that happen.

Just because you "worked hard" to create something doesn't make it property (for example clothes designers work their ass off as much as a painter, but the results of their work is not covered by copyright). Completely different laws apply to real property. A creative work is not real property by itself (there are, or course, weird cases where real property represents the creative work, e.g. a painting, but it is copyright that serves prevent duplication without the author's consent, property laws only cover the possession of one actual copy).
Define "take" as in:
- remix
- use as a source of inspiration
- tell my friends about it
- take a photograph of it
- play my own version of it
- play it where others can see/hear/enjoy it
- write additional fiction based on characters presented
- convert it to a play
- put it to music
- format shift for easier consumption for certain people
- translate it
- write about it
- editorialize about it
- play it/listen to it/watch it

The list goes on. There is no possession of creative works save of a physical medium of one copy (as I said before). There is no "take" in the sense you mean it.

The original amount of time for a work to become public domain was 14 years. This was during the time of the printing press. Now, we can access creative works much faster than they could back then, so really I think that the amount of years to become public domain should have shrunk, not gotten bigger. Five years seems about right to me. I wouldn't feel like I have to defend piracy if the powers that be only threatened people who were infringing on copyrighted material made within the last five years.

We have Disney to thank for expanding all rights reserved copyright to 70 years. Let's not forget that Disney took a lot of creative works and converted them to cartoons, some of them only a year after the original work was made. You can watch an excellent video to get a different perspective on this issue, if you have some free time, called RIP: A Remix Manifesto. It is a pay what you want download that you can find <span class="bold">here</span>, so you could pay only $.01 to view it if you don't really care about it.

As far as your socialist comment, I consider myself an advocate of free markets, but I think it is better not to argue using terms like that in a pejorative manner. My view is that the benefit of free markets is to make resources abundant, not creating scarcity. The Mises Institute is a strong critic of socialism (at least on the State level, they don't care if people privately, voluntarily pool their money together for socialist reasons), and you can find their stance on current copyright <span class="bold">here</span>. They call copyright as it is now mercantilism, which I agree with. I do hope that Creative Commons licenses will become more prevalent.

Yes but how does one install?

Most are pre-installed, if they're not, through DOSBox.

Cuz I wanna play the D&D based ones. <.<

Abandonia is breaking copyright law. But then, jaywalking, home recording (if you believe the music labels), eating a grape in a supermarket and driving 55km/h on a 50km/h road are also all illegal.

What do they have in common? Nobody gives a shit. In Germany we refer to them as "Kavaliersdelikte" - defined as crimes in the word of the law but where everyone ignores the law anyway and it's not worth the police enforcing it.

The supermarket would rather that you would rather test a grape and buy a bunch than buy nothing at all. The police would rather spend their time and resources on catching those arseholes that drive 70km/h in a 30 zone instead of those driving 5km/h too fast (speed cameras in Germany are always set 5km/h above the actual speed limit to prevent an unmanageable flood of photos of minor speed limit violations).

Likewise, I would bet that EA, Codemasters, Activision et al. would rather that you just downloaded that 1984 game with a guilty conscience than spend thousands of dollars on enforcing unexploited copyrights, suffering negative publicity in the process. It's called learning from the

Abandonware is always legally "wrong", but when you start offering games that are available for sale elsewhere, it also becomes morally wrong. That's why I like the way Abandonia operates, offering unavailable games for free while providing purchase links for those available to buy.

I believe copyright should be handled in much the same way as trademarks are. You should be required to enforce said copyright, or else it becomes forfeit. I don't think its much to ask to write the odd letter telling people that they are violating your copyright.

This would regulate the grey area whereby games that genuinely are abandoned (i.e. you can't even contact the author anymore or they are so disinterested in the IP that they refuse to acknowledge it) are still available for the public benefit but still providing a means for copyright owners to benefit from their work.

Indeed, many authors give their explicit blessing to the public distribution of old software (usually because it has no commercial value any more).

All most all of these games here aren't being sold anywhere and most organizations that developed/published these titles are now probably defunct . Such sites serve as a forbidden chronicle of our once glorious pc gaming past. Moreover they are wise enough to remove titles that are published on GOG or elsewhere.

While it may perhaps be illegal it is not entirely unethical as you will be missing out on a magnificent experience that wouldn't otherwise be possible.I suppose it's all about how you look at it -

Don't link to the forbidden pages- it upsets ye GoGs.

Apparently, abandonware links work like a summoning chant

No, I had the link edited out once ye told me before the summon even appeared. Would ye knw of a working summoning chant to conjure up a gorgeous vixen(women) who's not a succubus?

So, how can you name Need for speed "abandoned" ? Everybody know who holds the rights to it. And I hope you know that EA might tear you apart for this, yes? And I'm sure they won't be "asking to take the game down", just filing a lawsuit right away (if they want).

ps. you should be the one to ask IF you CAN upload some game on your website, not THEM ask YOU to take it down.

Im just telling, it's not "iffy" , it's treading on a really thin ice with these companies.