Bit of a grey area this one, some devs are fine with it and are happy that their older creations are still loved and cherished today, others on the other hand aren't happy about distribution of their older I.P's.

If you look on the infoseek on World of Spectrum as an example, the site is endorsed by Amstrad (who owns rights to ZX Spectrum brand after mid 80's buyout).

Looking through said infoseek most of the old games are allowed distribution, a lot of work was put into building the site and especially it's catalog getting permissions etc over the last 15 year or so. You can grab Tap and TZX files and make your own mix tapes, however on some you will see distribution denied, companies like Codemasters for example do not allow distribution of the earlier work so if you are looking for Dizzy on the Spectrum you won't be able to get it from there.

Not to mention that devs often (or even usually - although I think that in the 90's devs often kept more rights than these days) aren't the ones owning the rights to the games they've made. They won't make any money off these games anymore, no matter whether they are sold again or not.

If they are, then they change to game to be under a open license. If they can not, it means they are not the rights holders, and it its not grey - they are promoting piracy.

Morally it may be difficult, but it is really very black and white - no room for any grey areas there.

Probably not the right thread to ask this in, and possibly not the right audience (unless there's a software lawyer or something skulking about gog), but it seems somewhat related, and this seemed more convenient than creating a new thread, so..

Everyone here is talking about "copyright". I'm assuming copyright is not the same as "distribution rights". The company that owns the copyright can dictate who has distribution rights, right? And if the copyright owners cease to exist/change, what does that do to the distribution right people?

Navagon on page 1 mentioned some games that have had their copyrights abandoned. What does that mean, and are there some examples? Or was it just another way of saying they were rereleased as freeware?

What would happen to the games whose copyright is owned by a company if the company ceases to exist? In some cases I've seen other companies buy off the rights (I seem to remember THQ (I think? or was it Deep Silver) went out of business, but had all its games pawned off to other companies), but what if they don't?

Finally, Kingdoms of Amalur's company also went out of business a while back, with some pretty messed up backstory, but it seems it is still being sold on Steam by EA. I also read that the game's rights are owned by the State of Rhode Island. What does that mean, effectively? Does Rhode Island earn any income from sales? Does it have the right to hire a company to make sequels? Can they give some other company distribution rights or distribute it themselves? Do they have the authority to make it available for free?
In the mean time, not sure how useful it is, but if you could vote for it on the wishlist?

I think you overestimate how much some people care about formalities and underestimate most people's laziness. Plus some of these devs don't have any sort of online presence suitable for making such an announcement (for a product they may have made more than twenty years ago!) or don't know how to make sure that a license change occurs to anybody in the first place. There most definitely are many devs out there who see their old game on an abandonware site, just smile at the fact that it's still out there and that some people enjoy it and let things be. Not to mention others who simply couldn't care less and have left this part of their life behind them for good. It's unrealistic to assume that because a game never formally got an open license its owner condemns its distribution through abandonware sites.

Distribution right means the right to distribute something. A company can aquire the rights to distribute a game in behest of some other company and that usually means the one with the distributor rigths does the advertising and such for the game, but they don't own the rights to it. They get their percentage cut from the sales, depending on the contract.

If the rights holder goes belly up and the rights to the game is acquired by some other comapny that usually means that the distribution contracts are re-negotiated. In this process the current distributor may lose the rights to the game.

Fallout-series is a good example here, as when Interplay lost the rights to the game, GOG lost their right to sell it, as Bethesda is interested doing business only through Steam.

Well, the discution is pretty civil to this point. Pleasant to see people putting their arguments in a civil manner without jumping at each other's throat, in fact :)
I can imagine some communication, at least. As in "We will now sell game X, so please pull the downloads from your site, and please tell people looking for it that they can buy it at this link. Thanks."
So "partnership" is probaly a strong word in this case, but a peaceful "live and let live, and don't concurence each other" relationship is very likely, at least with the less shady Abandonware sites.

Probably a safe enough bet, yes. Unless it's ActiBlizz or someone like that.
As GOG have found out themselves, numerous games are in a right legal black hole that nobody thought to sort out at the time various devs and publishers went out of business.
Night Dive might be able to sort out a few more games that are in a legal quandary. Paying both parties where the rights are in limbo.

IANAL, but FWIW, this should be pretty reliable.

It's definitely grey area no matter how much folks would believe otherwise. This is why non-lawyers are usually best not making such declarations. A failure to enforce ones rights over the course of years is something that's likely to come up as a defense. So, somebody may well still own the rights, but if they're failing to enforce their rights, they may well put themselves in a position where they can't enforce them if they change their minds.

Sort of like GOG's provision against tampering with the binaries. There's absolutely no way on earth that's going to stand up in court because of the years of inducement to violate the term along with a complete lack of any enforcement of it as well.

Same basic idea here, you can't let people violate the agreement over many years in order to boost the size of the violation so as to get a larger award out of a lawsuit.

The biggest problem though is that if they're not offering the games for sale, they wouldn't be entitled to any money except maybe lawyer's fees. So, the expected value of enforcing their rights is negative. Meaning that the expectation they should have is that they'll lose money on each attempt.
I think this is the 2nd best case scenario behind having works enter the public domain the way that they're supposed to.

GOG's marketing strategy was to partner with all of the abandonware sites they could. They abandonware sites agreed not to release anything GOG sold. Instead, they would link to GOG's site so that the purveyors of abandonware could get a legal copy and the abandonware sites would get a cut.

Back in the day, abandonware was the only place to get many games that now make a decent income on GOG. So it made sense to partner with them.

Also, CDProjekt was started by a prolific hacker/pirate who thought he could make more money selling legit games than pirating. So he started selling legit copies of Baldur's Gate, one of the most-pirated games in Poland at the time, with maps and other goodies on the streets of Warsaw and ended up making a lot of money. The rest is history.

So the founder also understands pirates very well. He understands that those who distribute want $ or to share their game and those who take the game would rather pay for a safe, goodies-filled package than get a free one that may be incomplete or riddled with viruses. Making professional links to abandonware (somewhere in the middle of pirate and legit storefront) seemed like a natural step to bring those who pirate games into the marketplace.

Not sure if you you are confusing it with trademarks here, not copyright and rights ownership. The later has very clear laws and regulations (depending on countries, off course) . The laws on copyright are quite clear, and there is no room for any such grey areas.

But as with all copyright infringements, it requires the rights holders to act on it, it is not an automatic process. But even if the rights holders do not prosecute the right infringements, it does not make it a 'grey area'

Nope, you completely lose trademark ownership if you don't enforce it. With copyright, it's like any other agreement you might have, if you're not enforcing your rights you may or may not get anything in court. But, you don't lose the right to enforce it in the future. You just might have to go through a period where you put the games back into a store or do something else to let people know that you do still own the rights.

This is where it gets rather complicated and why an attorney would have to be involved. Failing to enforce your rights would give people the idea that you weren't going to enforce them in the future which may or may not be a defense to the infringement. It certainly would make it more likely for the judge and jury to side with the defendant on the matter.

In most cases it would probably be one of a number of defenses that the defense would attempt to use and the age of the game would likely come into play.

Anyways, my point here is that it's not the black and white issue that some people imagine it to be. If somebody buys the rights to the games and decides to start sueing people for infringing, I'd imagine they'd have some success even if the previous owner wasn't enforcing it.
In may jurisdictions we already had that. In the US up until, I think 1976, you got an automatic 28 years of protection which could be extended beyond that for another term if you applied for it. That was the law in the US for the previous 200 years with changes mainly to the duration of protection available.

The really fucked up thing about the change to a blanket extension was that only a minority of owners ever applied for the extension. Probably 80% or so of the owners didn't bother. Which isn't surprising, most novels stop selling much after the first couple years, assuming you can even buy them after that. So, they don't benefit at all from the extensions.

I see you never lived in Germany

Whenever this topic comes up, people wildly confuse legality, morality, and the odds of getting caught with one another.