On Abandonment
Of the broad array of “creative works” that can be and are copyrighted, computer software may well be unique in it’s inevitable technological obsolescence. Novels, paintings, music, and photographs created decades ago are still popular, and enjoyable, and being sold and used. Only software, it seems, has such a short marketable lifespan.
Indeed, under many circumstances, computer games are considered “abandonware” after fifteen years - by the body created to protect the rights of the software creators themselves! It’s a grey area, no doubt about it, but it does mean that every year a new batch of games become available, at least potentially.
The Monkey Island games (with dialogue by SF writer Orson Scott Card) are still highly enjoyable, despite their age; the Discworld games still have a cult following. Just because they’re old, doesn’t mean they’re bad. Rather, in a lot of cases, it simply means they’re abandoned.
It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum - is it still piracy if the copyright owners don’t care? There’s certainly a difference between a publisher’s permission, and their apathy, but the general guideline of abandonware seems to be that software is only abandoned when nobody, anywhere, is in any way still making money off the game, new. This nullifies the biggest argument against filesharing, that such “piracy” costs the copyright owner lost revenue. Is it ethical? That’s up to you to decide.
If you’d like to re-live your childhood with some of the early PC games, explore an era of computer gaming with far more originality and creativity than today, or just discover what people were playing on the computer way back when, for free, head on over to Abandonia or Home of the Underdogs and get downloading. Come on, everybody’s doing it…
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