Oh, but the difference is most definitely decisive. Once you put your work out there wanting to erase it from existence is akin to wanting to unbirth a child.

I completely support abandonware on preservation grounds. The problems of demarcating "historical purposes," and "playing purposes," are the gray areas.

In that case I modify my example and sell my brand-new super-cool game to one friend only. After this it should certainly qualify as abandomware. :)

I am sure even German law does not force anybody to sell anything as non-essential as video games.

Selling it to one friend isn't the same as publishing either, as that friend would hardly count as a public audience. And your second statement is both true and unrelated to what I was saying. ;)

In that case I sell it publicly to everybody who wants it for exactly one day.

And regarding German law which should not be that different from any other law from any democratic country: you suggested that the German law makes a differences if something was published or not. I can only assume that you mean that it makes a difference with regard to the question of the legality of abandomware as this is the topic here. So I answered that I don't think that the law makes that difference, but that instead it leaves all the freedom and all the rights to do whatever they want with the rightholders in the area of video game publishing. So the legal side seems to be absolutely clear, right?

In the US at least, you are extremely incorrect, the law can and does tell you exactly who you can have as a customer, and in fact will have if you want to be in business at all, a very few examples of this include minorities and nursing mothers, there are loads more. What's more the law can and does inform you who can visit your shop and what they can do there even if the property is "privately owned", if it's considered "open to the public" then many public spaces rules, laws, and statutes apply.
In the US the law can and will do shit, especially if the person to which you say, "fuck off" is a member of a legally protected class (not sure if that's the right term, tired).

You're only a little correct and not at all in the way you wish to be. In the US creations of yours which are eligible for copyright protection are yours alone until you share them with anyone, intentionally or accidentally, at that point those items become everyone's. In order to, theoretically, encourage people to not put their candles under a bushel we, the people, grant a limited time monopoly to the copyright holder to make additional copies.

That's all copyright really grants you (speaking of the US specifically, but it's an important point of view since we're so damned dead-set on exporting it internationally).

"What I did is mine, and mine alone." doesn't even make any fucking sense in the case of copyright. No one has deprived you of your story by copying it, modifying it, retelling it, or whatever and the same goes for everything else really that has copyright protection. Shitons of industry happens in the US every day that is "really really hard and time consuming" and isn't at all granted copyright despite being pretty novel at times (the fashion industry is a great example, those fuckers copy each other all the time, funny how there's still clothing stores that sell a single shirt for 500 USD and up).

Yes, copyright is outdated, as Baz said, we've created something that makes it a relatively stupid fucking idea. It'd be like creating a food replicator and then saying "No wait! What about the farmers? What about Monsanto? We can't let people use this however they want! We must restrict the copying of food."

Creativity existed before copyright, it exists today even outside of area granted copyright, and even if copyright disappeared tomorrow, there would still be books, movies, plays, video games, paintings, and all kinds of stuff created every day.

There's this cool bronze beaver by my house. Every time I walk by people have rearranged a bunch of sticks people pulled off the bushes nearby, sometimes he's holding them, sometimes a pile at his feet, sometimes on his head, and sometimes they're arranged in patterns around him. One day the flowers were blooming and I took a picture of him, the sticks, and the flowers in the background.

Now tell me, who owns the copyright on my picture? Me? The kids who arranged the sticks that day? The guy who cast the bronze beaver? The picture wasn't just of the beaver, clearly he can't own all the copyright. The kids didn't do all that much work... but it was creative, still they didn't do a large portion of the content in my picture so they probably don't own the copyright. I took a picture, it was very beautiful, I didn't make the flowers, I didn't make the beaver, I didn't arrange the sticks, I didn't control the sunlight that day, all I did was arrange the shot. In theory I probably own the whole copyright and it is not a derivative work, under US law.

That right there is why copyright is so fucking stupid.

But for a video game it's rater simple. A relatively small group of people sits together, one has an idea, another creates some animations, the next programes the whole thing. In the end they sell it or they don't sell it or they sell it every friday. Of course they would have to obey some rules like eg. selling for the same price to people of all colors, ... but I am not aware of anything that forces them to extend the availability of a game. There are certainly cases available where it would cost more to offer it than the revenue would be. On the other hand, if it would actually be profitable, well it would be a loss, but not a real great one, since video games are just entertainment and not extremely essential in life. There are always plenty of alternatives and there is always the possibility to take part in creating your own game, which can be very similar to an abandomed game, even by existing copyright laws.

What would people say, if a game would be available instead but for a hundred bucks per copy? Would people still like GOG if GOG would be more expensive?

The right not to sell something as non-essential as a video game is probably an important factor of a free market. At least I don't want to remove this right easily.

Yes, copyright is not perfect, it's very complex and favors big companies with armies of lawyers. But the main argument for me is that I cannot imagine any possible way how video games could be developed and distributed at the quality level of today without copyright. Then in my eyes every incentive to pursuit such action would be destroyed. So while the creative minds behind it are always at least partly screwed, whatever you do, no copyright is not the solution. That's what I think.