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It is often very difficult or even impossible to locate who currently owns the rights to some intellectual property in order to re-release it legally.[0]

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053050/how-one-company-is-bring...

by the_af1 hours ago|

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Yeah, that's part of the copyright mess. It's partly described by Lawrence Lessig in his book "Free Culture" [1].

It seems petty to me that copyright holders (or their legal proxies) aggressively sought to shut down abandonware sites without any plan to make the software available in any shape. I mean, these were marginal pieces of software, no longer money earners, and the abandonware sites served as digital museums.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)

by charcircuit3 hours ago|

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>thus ensuring these games were preserved

I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.

by the_af2 hours ago|

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> I refuse to believe this train of logic. By the time copyright expires AI will be able to handle removing copyright protection and making it able to run on modern hardware. The only point of doing it now instead of later is so that people commit copyright infringement.

This must be some powerful combination of magical thinking plus a lack of awareness of the context. In the early 2000's, the time I'm recounting, nobody thought of AI. And it wasn't about copyright infringement since the people in the abandonware community I'm talking about owned the goddamn games, they were trying to digitally preserve them and make them available to others. You really need to be familiar with these people and their goals before you "refuse to believe" anything; uninformed opinions just won't do.

It helps to get a perspective about both the time and the type of games we're discussing. In fact, if you were at all a participant of the community back then, you'd know in which little regard warez kiddies were held.