Abandonware is widely thought to be computer software that is no longer current. While the term has largely referred to older games, other classes of software are sometimes described as such also. Definitions of "abandoned" vary; generally, it is used to refer to software that (1) is no longer available for legitimate purchase and/or (2) is at least a certain number of years old. It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Computer program. ...

The term has no legal meaning, and much abandonware is not in the public domain, so it cannot necessarily be legally copied or distributed without the permission of the owner. Copyrights in the U.S. do not expire until 70 years after the death of the copyright owner, or if the copyright is held by a company (as is often the case with software), 95 years after first publication.^[1] The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... Copyright symbol Copyright is a set of exclusive rights regulating the use of a particular expression of an idea or information. ...

Software companies (like companies in many other industries) change their names, go bankrupt, merge with other companies or cease to be for a variety of reasons. When this happens, the rights of the products are usually transferred to some other company, who may or may not sell or support the software.

Use of the term abandonware is used to make copying software sound more legitimate, in the case where the software is still under copyright protection.^[2] Some companies actively defend their old copyright, such as WordPerfect and LucasArts. Some companies have released their old work into the public domain. Most companies have not made an active statement either way. WordPerfect is a proprietary word processing application. ... LucasArts is an American video game developer and publisher. ...

History

People have distributed old software since the dawn of personal computing, but the activity remained low-key until the advent of the Internet. While trading old games has had many names and forms, the actual term "abandonware" was coined by Peter Ringering in late 1996^{[citation needed]}. Ringering found a few classic game websites similar to his own, contacted their webmasters, and formed the original "Abandonware Ring" in February 1997.^[3] The original Ring was little more than links to each other's websites, with one site indexing them all to provide a rudimentary search facility.

In October of 1997 , the Interactive Digital Software Association sent cease and desist letters to all sites on the Abandonware Ring, which resulted in most of them shutting down. This had the unintended effect of spurring others to create their own abandonware sites and organizations, many more than the original Ring. Some of the early abandonware sites formed after the demise of the original ring include Classic Trash and Home of the Underdogs. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the trade association of the computer and video game industry in the United States. ... Cease-and-desist is a legal term meaning essentially stop: It is used in demands for a person or organization to stop doing something (to cease and desist from doing it). ... Home of the Underdogs (HOTU) is a PC game archive founded by Sarinee Achavanuntakul in September 1998, and has grown to be one of the largest abandonware sites on the Internet. ...

Classes of abandonware

The term abandonware is broad, and encompasses many different types of old software.

• Commercial software unsupported but still owned by a viable company can be easy or hard for researchers to locate. The availability of the software depends on the company's attitude towards the old software (and in many cases, the company which owns the rights to the software may in fact not be the same company with which it originated and may even not remember they own it).
  • Some companies, like Borland, make some of their software available online,^[4] therefore turning it into a form of freeware.
  • Other companies do not make old versions available for free use and ignore requests to let people copy the games or other software they own the legal rights to.

• Commercial software apparently owned by a company that is no longer in business can also be difficult to locate, but often no entity defends the copyright if this software is put onto abandonware web sites. (An example of this is Digital Research's original PL/I compiler for MS-DOS.) However, the rights to the software may have been bought by another company or have reverted to the original authors, who could bring copyright lawsuits against those copying the software without permission.

• Old shareware whose author still makes it available can be found online. Finding historical versions, however, can be difficult since most shareware archives delete old versions when new versions came out. Authors may or may not make older releases available.
  • Some websites attempt to collect and offer for download old versions of shareware, freeware, and (in some cases) commercial applications. In some cases these sites have been forced to take down older versions of software, particularly if the company producing that software is still maintaining it (new versions), or if the new software features Digital Rights Management that the previous version did not (in this case, having an old version of a program can be a way to defeat DRM.)

• Old shareware that was once released, but the author is no longer maintaining or supporting it. Again, finding historical versions is possible in some cases, but very difficult.

• Open source and freeware programs can be abandoned. In some cases, the source code is still available or was part of the release, which can be an interesting historical artifact. An interesting case of abandonware is PC-LISP, which can still be found online, which implements the Franz Lisp dialect. The MS-DOS based PC-LISP still runs well in emulators and on Windows.

Borland Software Corporation is a software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... Digital Research, Inc. ... PL/I (Programming Language One, pronounced pee el one) is an imperative computer programming language designed for scientific, engineering, and business applications. ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... Look up shareware in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Digital rights management (DRM) is an umbrella term referring to technologies used by publishers or copyright owners to control access to or usage of digital data or hardware, and to restrictions associated with a specific instance of a digital work or device. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... PC-LISP is an implementation of the Franz Lisp dialect for MS-DOS PCs by Peter Ashwood-Smith. ... Franz Lisp, written at UC Berkeley by the students of Professor Richard J. Fateman, was a Lisp system based larged on Maclisp, but written specifically to be a host for running Macsyma on a Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) VAX. It appeared on the scene at the end of 1978 shortly... Microsoft Windows is the name of several families of proprietary software operating systems by Microsoft. ...

The law

There is no recognition of a legal term abandonware in copyright law. There is a long held concept of abandonment in trademark law, but it is a direct result of the infinite term of trademark protection. Currently, a copyright can be released into the public domain if the owner clearly does so in writing; however this formal process is not considered abandoning, but rather releasing. Those who do not own a copyright cannot merely claim the copyright abandoned and start using it without permission of the copyright holder, who would then have a legal remedy. Hence abandonware is sometimes considered to be synonymous with "old warez". The Bass Red Triangle, was the first trademark registered in Britain in 1876. ... Warez refers primarily to virtual copyrighted material traded in violation of copyright law. ...

Hosting and distributing copyrighted software without permission is illegal. Copyright holders, sometimes through the Entertainment Software Association, send cease and desist letters, and some sites have shut down or removed software as a result. However, according to Wired magazine, most of the association's efforts are spent on new games, due to those titles having the highest value.^[5] The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is the trade association of the computer and video game industry in the United States. ... Cease-and-desist is a legal term meaning essentially stop: It is used in demands for a person or organization to stop doing something (to cease and desist from doing it). ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Companies do sometimes voluntarily relinquish copyright on software, putting it into the public domain, or re-license it as free software or freeware. id Software is an early proponent of a similar practice, releasing the source code for the game engine (but not the actual game content, such as levels or textures) of some older titles under a free software license. Other examples include Amstrad, who support emulation and free distribution of CPC and ZX Spectrum hardware ROMs and software, and Revolution Software, which released their game Beneath a Steel Sky as freeware and gave the engine's source code to the authors of ScummVM to add support for the game. Transfer of public domain or free software is perfectly legal, distinguishing it from copyrighted abandonware. See list of commercial games released as freeware. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ... Clockwise from top: The logo of the GNU Project (the GNU head), the Linux kernel mascot Tux the Penguin, and the FreeBSD daemon Free software is a term coined by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation[1] to refer to software that can be used, studied, and modified without... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... id Software (IPA: officially, though originally ) is an American computer game developer based in Mesquite, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. ... A game engine is the core software component of a computer or video game or other interactive application with real-time graphics. ... Free software is software which grants recipients the freedom to modify and redistribute the software. ... Amstrad is a manufacturer of electronics based in Brentwood in Essex, England and founded in 1968 by Sir Alan Michael Sugar in the UK. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar Trading. ... The Amstrad CPC was a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad during the 1980s and early 1990s. ... The ZX Spectrum is a home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd. ... Revolution Software Logo. ... Beneath a Steel Sky is a 1994 science fiction, more specifically cyberpunk, point and click adventure game. ... ScummVM is a multi-platform stack-based virtual machine which was originally made to allow one to play LucasArts adventure games that use the SCUMM system on platforms other than those for which they were originally released. ... Commercial games released as freeware are games that, in their original license, were not considered freeware, but were re-released at a later date with a freeware license, sometimes as publicity for a forthcoming sequel or compilation release. ...

There are active groups that try to lobby companies to release their software as legal abandonware. These efforts have met with mixed results. One example is the huge library of educational titles released by MECC. MECC was sold to Brøderbund, who was sold to The Learning Company (TLC); when TLC was contacted about releasing classic MECC titles as freeware, it was determined that the documentation proving that TLC owned the rights to these titles could not be located, and therefore the rights for these titles are "in limbo" and may never be able to be legally released.^[6] The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (later Corporation), most commonly known as MECC, was a state-funded company founded in 1973. ... Brøderbund Software was a maker of computer games, educational software and the Print Shop productivity tools. ... The Learning Company (TLC) is an American educational software company, founded in 1980. ...

Enforcement of copyright

Old copyrights are sometimes not defended. This can be due to intentional non-enforcement by their owners due to the software's age or obsolescence, but sometimes because the corporate copyright holder went out of business without explicitly transferring ownership, leaving no one aware of their right to defend the copyright. Nevertheless, some companies (such as LucasArts) vigorously defend their rights to old software. Corporate redirects here. ... LucasArts is an American video game developer and publisher. ...

Even if the copyright is not defended, copying of this software is still unlawful in most jurisdictions when the copyright is still in effect. Abandonware changes hands based on the presumption that the time and money that a copyright holder would have to spend enforcing the copyright is greater than any money the holder would earn selling software licenses. Additionally, proponents will argue that distributing software for whom there is nobody to defend the copyright is acceptable. Companies that have gone out of business without transferring their copyrights are an example of this; many manufacturers and software companies that developed for older systems are long since out of business and precise documentation of the copyrights may not even be readily available.

Arguments

Proponents of abandonware argue that it is more ethical to make copies of such software than new software that still sells.^{[citation needed]} Some who are ignorant of copyright law have incorrectly taken this to mean that abandonware is legal to distribute, although no software is old enough for its copyrights to have expired. Even in cases where the original company no longer exists, the rights usually still belong to someone else, though no one may know who actually owns the rights, including the owners themselves.

Abandonware advocates also frequently cite historical preservation as a reason for trading abandoned software.^[3] Older computer media is fragile and very prone to rapid deterioration, and therefore it is necessary to copy these materials to a more modern and stable medium and generate as many copies as possible to ensure the software will not disappear.

Users of still-functional older computer systems argue that they need abandonware because even if a title is re-released by its copyright holder, the new version most likely will be for a modern PC computer, while their older system may be an old PC or not even a PC at all. Additionally, re-released software is most likely not available in the medium used by old computer systems (5.25" diskette, cartridge, cassette tape, etc.) and therefore there is no way to legally purchase compatible software for old computers.

Those who are against the practice argue that distributing this software, while not immediately obvious, can still deny the copyright holder potential sales (in the form of re-released titles, official emulation systems, and so on). Also, it could be asserted that if people can acquire an old version of a program for free, they may be less likely to purchase a newer version for a price if the old version will meet their needs.

Abandonware sites

The Macintosh Garden abandonware site emulates the look of the software it hosts.

Several sites on the Internet archive abandonware for download, including old versions of applications which are difficult or impossible to find in any other way. Much of this software fits the definition of "software that is no longer current, but is still of interest", but the line between true abandonware and simple software piracy or warez is blurry (and calling a site abandonware has been frequently used as a cover for distributing warez). Many abandonware sites have warez available, intentionally or unknowingly. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Warez refers primarily to virtual copyrighted material traded in violation of copyright law. ...

The Internet Archive is building an archive of such applications, but are not offering them for download, as a way to preserve them without violating copyright.^[7] The project has received an exemption from the United States Copyright Office for this purpose.^[8] The logo of Internet Archive The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. ... The United States Copyright Office, a part of the Library of Congress, is the official U.S. government body that maintains records of copyright registration in the United States. ...

References

Year 2007 (MMVII) is now the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 172nd day of the year (173rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is now the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 67th day of the year (68th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is now the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... April 2 is the 92nd day of the year (93rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2001 (MMI) was a common year starting on Monday (link displays the 2001 Gregorian calendar). ... September 17 is the 260th day of the year (261st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2007 (MMVII) is now the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the AD/CE era. ... is the 67th day of the year (68th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

See also

• Freeware
• Glossary of legal terms in technology
• List of freeware games
• List of commercial games released as freeware
• Orphaned technology

This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... The legal aspects of technology involve many different terms. ... This is a list of freeware video games. ... Commercial games released as freeware are games that, in their original license, were not considered freeware, but were re-released at a later date with a freeware license, sometimes as publicity for a forthcoming sequel or compilation release. ... Orphaned Technology is a descriptive term for computer products, programs, and platforms that have been abandoned by their original developers. ...

External links

• (French) Abandonware-Utopia, Site français d'Abandonware.
• "Abandonwarez: the pros outweigh the cons", an opinion piece on the web site Adventure Classic Gaming.
• Flashbacks For Free: The Skinny On Abandonware, Marc Saltzman on GameSpot.com