So far my posts have been discussing orphaned works and I had stated in my first post I wanted to research abandonware as well. Abandonware is an orphaned work in a way. There are many websites dedicated to abandonware (see bottom of post for examples). One such website is called Abandonia and it has been around for ten years now. It explains that websites like this are to preserve old, forgotten games. There seem to be many of these abandonware websites that are specifically for games.
This reminds me of when a friend of mine back when I was fresh out of high school (seems like so long ago!) came over and was so excited about having all these old video games on his laptop. He proceeded to hook his laptop up to my TV and he had controllers, but I can’t remember if he hooked them up to the TV or the laptop. Anyway, the games definitely looked old compared to the newer games out and I recognized a few of them even though I was never much of a video games person. Reading about abandonware takes me back to that incident, but I wonder if he illegally downloaded those or what? He had so many, I would guess at least some of them weren’t considered abandonware.
Copyright Law does not recognize the term “abandonware”. But according to a comment made by the Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs in 2005, Jule Sigall, “when economic gain is no longer being pursued due to abandonment, the reason for the copyright in the first place has evaporated.” Segall goes on to make some very good points about why the abandonware should pass into the public domain. Some of these reasons are:
• Can be used to build something better
• Might be a better product than the “latest and greatest” until bugs are worked out in the newer version
• A user might not be able to afford the “latest and greatest” hardware to run the newer software, which in turn prolongs that hardware’s life before it is added to the toxic waste landfills
Although I could not easily find it, there was a ruling that became effective November 26, 2006 that enabled access to commercially unavailable software (I am still looking for this information on the U.S. Copyright Office website! In the meantime I have listed some sources below that talk about these rules, some of them I am not sure how reliable they are so beware). I am not exactly sure how to search for this on the U.S. Copyright Office website, it is painfully obvious that I have a lot to learn about copyright in general.
After reading some information on the Internet Archive website along with some documents from the U.S. Copyright Office website, I think I have a better idea of this “abandonware” issue. There was a project formed in 2004 called the Classic Software Preservation Project (CLASP). The Internet Archive had successfully lobbied the U.S. Copyright Office in 2003 concerning the archiving of obsolete software. This allowed an exemption to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
When trying to decipher the document I found through a search on the U.S. Copyright Office website, I got an idea of what this allowed but it seemed only librarians and archivists are allowed to perform this archiving. So I am still researching if this applies to everyone and when a person “archives” software for the purpose of preservation they are deemed part of this group.
It seems the more I read the more there is to consider and research when it comes to orphan works.
References:
http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/comments/OW0448-Feders.pdf
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1622377/copyrights_and_downloads_for_music.html
http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2006/71fr68472.html (section: III. Discussion, A. The Six Exempted Cases, Number 2)
http://digg.com/gaming_news/USA_Legalizes_Abandonware
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/11/23/us-copyright-office-grants-abandonware-rights/
http://www.archive.org/details/clasp
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10112022-46.html
Abandonware websites:
http://www.abandonia.com/
http://www.freeoldies.com/index.php
http://www.abandongames.com/
http://www.abandonwarering.com/
http://www.abandonware.net/
orphan works and abandonware by Christy B Coulter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
4 comments:
I liked that you took an issue that you were interested in and related it to the main topic. I still remember how excited I was when a friend mailed me an old CD-ROM of Oregon Trail a couple years ago and it still worked (but not on Linux). All the talk of abandonware and orphans made me think of Oliver Twist a bit :) I saw that you focused on this a lot in you presentation, and wonder if you could have gone back to the beginning of the class if you might have chosen to just focus on abandonware. I thought the description of abandonware that you gave was interesting. The idea of people loosing the rights to something because of that.
Hi Lumarie! I just now read all your comments and thanks for all your kind words! I am sorry I was such a beginner at figuring out this blog thing. I just now figured out the hyperlink issue. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't working all this time. I am planning on posting a final post in the next couple of days. Just wanted you to know in case you have time to catch it later. I have definitely learned a lot in creating this blog, but am still a little unsure about including links and what the etiquette for that is exactly.
OK, I have to apologize for the final comment thing because I was not aware that we had an extra week to finish the blogs, so I will wait till Sunday and post more comments. I thought that the blog had to be finished by July 12. I remember Awa talking about us needing more time, but I thought that that was for the evaluations, not for the summary post. I just ran into someone else from the class, and they corrected me. Sorry.
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