Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, which can no longer be found for sale, and for which no official support is available and cannot be bought.
[1] Within an intellectual rights contextual background, abandonware is a software (or hardware) sub-case of the general concept of orphan works.
)[6] According to PC Gamer: The Lord of the Rings: The Battle For Middle-earth II, The Neverhood, Black & White, Midtown Madness.
Once a software product becomes abandonware, there is a high risk that the source code becomes lost or irrecoverable even for its original developers, as multiple cases have shown.
[a] One of many examples is the closure of Atari in Sunnyvale, California in 1996, when the original source codes of several milestones of video game history (such as Asteroids and Centipede) were thrown out as trash, some of which were later recovered.
[21] As response to the missing availability of abandonware, people have distributed old software since shortly after the beginning of personal computing, but the activity remained low-key until the advent of the Internet.
[22] Ringering found classic game websites similar to his own, contacted their webmasters, and formed the original Abandonware Ring in February 1997.
In October 1997, the Interactive Digital Software Association sent cease and desist letters to all sites within the Abandonware Ring, which led to most shutting down.
In later years abandonware websites actively acquired and received permissions from developers and copyright holders (e.g. Jeff Minter, Magnetic Fields[23][24] or Gremlin Interactive[25]) for legal redistribution of abandoned works;[26] an example is World of Spectrum who acquired the permission from many developers and successfully retracted a DMCA case.
[31] The project advocated for an exemption from the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act to permit them to bypass copy protection, which was approved in 2003 for a period of three years.
[43][44] For instance, the source code of the unreleased PlayStation Portable game Duke Nukem: Critical Mass was discovered in August 2014 to be preserved at the Library of Congress.
[48] In December 2013 the ICHEG received a donation of several SSI video games, for instance Computer Bismarck, including the source code for preservation.
[52][53] In 2010 Computer History Museum began with the preservation of source code of important software, beginning with Apple's MacPaint 1.3.
[84][85] For instance, on December 9, 2013 the real-time strategy video game Conquest: Frontier Wars was, after ten years of non-availability, re-released by gog.com, also including the source code.
[88] Even in cases where the original company no longer exists, the rights usually belong to someone else, though no one may be able to trace actual ownership, including the owners themselves.
[91] Rarely has any abandonware case gone to court, but it is still unlawful to distribute copies of old copyrighted software and games, with or without compensation, in any Berne Convention signatory country.
Additionally, abandonware proponents argue that distributing software for which there is no one to defend the copyright is morally acceptable, even where unsupported by current law.
Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.
"In November 2006 the Library of Congress approved an exemption to the DMCA that permits the cracking of copy protection on software no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder so that they can be archived and preserved without fear of retribution.
However, because of the length of copyright enforcement in most countries, it is likely that by the time a piece of software defaults to public domain, it will have long become obsolete, irrelevant, or incompatible with any existing hardware.
Additionally, due to the relatively short commercial, as well as physical, lifespans of most digital media, it is entirely possible that by the time the copyright expires for a piece of software, it will no longer exist in any form.
Some user-communities convince companies to voluntarily relinquish copyright on software, putting it into the public domain, or re-license it as freeware.
Amstrad is an example which supports emulation and free distribution of CPC and ZX Spectrum hardware ROMs and software.
[101] Lost or unclear copyrights to vintage out-of-print software is not uncommon, as rights to the No One Lives Forever series illustrates.
Therefore, several companies decided to release the source code specifically to allow the user communities to provide further technical software support (bug fixes, compatibility adaptions etc.)
For instance, in December 2015 Microsoft released the Windows Live Writer source code[106] to allow the community to continue the support.
[109] Another important example for open sourced general software is the office suite StarOffice which was released by Sun Microsystems in October 2000 as OpenOffice.org[110] and is in continued development as Collabora Online, LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, a broad range of enterprise level support options are available.