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[Dasleah]

Won't the copyright expire in 15 years or something unless they renew it? If the developer has agreed to let anyone just take it then they probably wouldn't do that.

Copyright doesn't 'expire' for the length of the creator's life + 75 years. And even if they do release the product for free into the wild, they're just waving away the fees normally associated with distributing it. They still own it. Same reason why Toady can release a free Dwarf Fortress game and no-one else can make Dwarf Fortress game of their own.

[Eidalac]

If the developer has agreed to let anyone just take it then they probably wouldn't do that.

You assume the developer agreed to anything.

In all honestly, the idea of abandon-ware is that the company is either defunct (an can't take legal action) or the game is old enough that the owner wouldn't be interested in the effort to take action.

Unless the publisher of the game posts a free download on there official website, then getting a copy for free from the net is still a form of piracy, regardless for how it's justified.

[Micro102]

I have to disagree with that. Piracy is to keep comanies from losing money. The fines are usually the potential money that could of been made.

But if a game is never going to be used again then they are not losing any money.

[RAM]

They could argue that if you want to download it at all then there is still the potential to make money from it, but if they don't actually sell it anymore it is difficult to justify a loss of profits. I wonder if you could argue that a piece of software has entered the public domain if the owners haven't made sufficient effort to maintain their property...

I would argue that legal damages are on-topicish...

[JoshuaFH]

That's something I don't get, how does something enter public domain if someone doesn't "maintain" their property?

[RAM]

Take the term biro as an example, people use it to refer to a type of pen, you can know the term biro without having a clue where it comes from or what significance it has, it is just a term for a pen. Biro is a term that someone used for their own product and and would be perfectly copywriteable except that you can't copywrite a term that is in the public language, it would be like copywriting 'bin' or 'garment', something that public just doesn't work as private property...
So to maintain intellectual property you need to keep reminding people that it is intellectual property, or else it will just sort of sink into the public domain and lose its identity...

So I could imagine a scenario in which people keep stealing a piece of software until it becomes so ubiquitous that people just kind of regard it as a common piece of computer paraphernalia that doesn't really have any private identity anymore...

[Eidalac]

While a term can enter public domain via common usage, and you can't copyright it after that point, you can have a previous copyright.  Take Band-aids, which is a registered brand name.  While the bulk of the population use band-aid as a term for any adhesive medical strips, only one company can legally put the name Band-Aid on the box.

And even if a company were to let a name/product copyright lapse, and it were to become public domain, they could very well get the copyright back at a later date, since they could prove they were the source.


While you can justify using abandoned-ware by saying the company can't be loosing money, so far as legality goes it's still software piracy.  They own it and have the right to determine how it's distrusted, even if they have stopped doing so, they do not loose that right by default.

A good example would be many of the downloadable arcade/old school games you can get on x-box and PS3 (I think) presently.  Most of those games were out of circulation for decades (or were never an option in the case of the arcade games), but the companies still hold the rights to them, and so can either sell them or give them away as downloads.

Abandonment is in the eye of the beholder, ultimately.  Regardless of how you may view and justify it it, it's still, technically, illegal.

You can elect to disregard that fact, for whatever reason, but that is a choice you make, not the owners of the product in question.

[Azzuro]

^
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Since when do antivirus makers have to resort to spambots to advertise?

Regarding the whole copyright of words thing, I agree with Eidalac, particularly the example of band-aids. I think most laws covering copyright and trademarks generally only prohibit competitors for actively advertising with another companies trademark. An example of how this might be circumvented here: Suppose a company invented a new kind of electronic device which they name "Tricorder". Let's imagine that the word "tricorder" enters general usage to describe any device with abilities resembling the original. If I were to make a device which was almost the same, but just different enough to escape the patent, and I did not make any effort to differentiate the two, the word "tricorder" would quickly become associated with my device too. At this point, the original company cannot sue me for trademark infringement, because at no point did my company advertise or even refer to my device as a "tricorder".

I wonder if you could argue that a piece of software has entered the public domain if the owners haven't made sufficient effort to maintain their property...

To answer this, no, you can't. By the same reasoning someone could jump into my garden and steal a potted plant in the night, and then argue that I should have invested in a guard dog or electrified fence to protect my belongings.

[ein]

Thread's from '09, kid.

[Azzuro]

Okay .....Whoops! Sorry!

[Jay]

Try with KAspersky too, I use it and I can say you that for sure. I truly recommend it, it helped a lot to keep my computer clean. Use it with trust: *snip*

Oh, how ironic.
Thread about viruses, spambot posts about an anti-virus software but links to what is, in fact, a virus.

[Outcast Orange]

I don't support the original intent of this thread.
The necro is fine though, since it pertains to piracy discussion.

[Duuvian]

Try with KAspersky too, I use it and I can say you that for sure. I truly recommend it, it helped a lot to keep my computer clean. Use it with trust: http://www.trustdownload.com/Antivirus-and-Spyware-Cleaners/Antivirus/Kaspersky-Internet-Security-7.0.html

DO NOT trust this person who registered today for one post advertising Kaspersky. Kaspersky is on the list of potential malware as it changes things on your computer that can't be changed back easily in an effort to make you pay for a liscence.

It's probably a spambot that searches forums for terms like Malware.

AVG anti-virus is decent and has a free version but has "partnered" with google, so it can't be trusted 100% but it's better than nothing and uninstalls fairly easily.

An excellent free program that allows pre-emptive immunization for free along with useful advanced tools like system startup and registry scan is Spybot Search and Destroy. It also has an optional systems settings protector called TeaTimer, but it eats up resources.

If you use Firefox, get the no-script add-on and learn how to use it. It blocks scripts from running on any page, and it's easy to re-enable the scripts if a page doesn't load correctly; in the rick click menu.

Ad-aware is decent and has a free version but I think they may have been bought out like AVG.

I've used Advanced System Care Free, and it tells me that it finds problems quite often, but I'm not sure if it's just a marketing ploy or not. If you have a harddrive that won't defrag with the windows defragger for some reason, IObit also makes a defragger that also has the option to optimize your files so that recently used files are near the "top" of your hard drive or something. I had a computer that wouldn't defrag (was my neighbors, 90% fragged) and I used the IObit defrag and it managed to do it.

It's pretty sad to see independent AV companies bought by the people getting rich by cluttering up the internet with things that possibly can harm your computer.