How about you answer the questions posed to you?

What gives you the right to own the game for free?
You didn't write it. Many people paid good money for it, but PookaMustard somehow deserves it for free? Why? Tell me why you are morally entitled to download someone else's work? Doesn't matter whether it is currently available for sale or not (like Castle of Illusion - pulled because the Mickey Mouse licensing expired). If you download it illegally, you owe Disney for their Mickey Mouse character as well as the developer who owns the rights to the game. Same with GRID who you would owe Codemasters and the car companies for their licensed cars. You do not have the right to the game for free. For titles with music, you still owe the musicians for downloading their music...

Why are you ENTITLED to it for free? Quite frankly, I think this generation should be calling the generation of "entitled" cry-babies yelling "Me, Me, Me" "Mine, Mine, Mine" over all kinds of things that never and don't belong to them.

But to answer your questions...
1) How does something being on sale have anything to do with it? The store is closed. It's midnight. No one is selling it. So you can walk into the store and take it, "because no one is currently selling it"? How is that not theft? Here's the real rundown...you took something which doesn't belong to you which has value. You have no legal nor moral basis for owning it at all. Doesn't matter if you are "just making a copy", it is not yours and you have no rights to it...

2) Are you even serious with that question? A woman is passed out at a party, she didn't speak up and say "No". So anything you do has consent? A pirateware site puts Skyrim up for download. 10,000 people download it. Bethesda finds out and their excuse is going to be, "They didn't say I couldn't"? (Well, at least until they found out). Ascribing anything to silence is just plain silly. And try explaining why a company who produced a game should have the burden of notifying every fly-by-night abandonware site to cease and desist in providing their game? Shouldn't it be the burden of that abandonware site to investigate and contact the developer for permission? Which do you think will make more sense to a judge or a jury or any reasonable person in court? That should answer your question...

3) In legal terms, it would be called doing one's "due diligence". It's already been discussed multiple times that "abandonware" is not a legitimate term at all. So for you to claim just because the site claims everything on it is abandoned won't fly at all. You are expected to make a reasonable effort in verifying such a claim, especially given that you are downloading a game you have no rights or contract to own. Now, in the case of Captain Claw and the unofficial site I posted. There are links to interviews with some of the programmers. The link to this unofficial site happens to also be directly linked to the Wikipedia page. There is probably more one could cite too. I believe that a good case can be made that WB/Monolith should be aware of the site on these grounds. If you also do a reasonable search to make sure it is not on sale. So downloading from that site, given that you have done your "due diligence", I doubt any judge can fault you for believing it was intended to be free.

In terms of downloading from any random abandonware site, especially if that site has many titles which are available for sale elsewhere or containing Trademarked titles such as Civilization, ignorance, of law, or in this case "turning a blind eye" is no excuse. You have no legal or moral basis to own that game. You have no license for it. You have no rights to it. Why should it be yours? A judge or jury is going to look at your claim and laugh at you...

In short you are going to have to do far better than "But the site said it was abandoned"...

Hey TinyE, see you are still trolling and providing nothing useful to the discussion...

The loss if any is so minor, that one could not mark it in a ledgerbook. It isn't so much a "lost sale" because money isn't being lost. Just not being made. You don't just magically get penalized when someone lifts a copy of a copy.

0 may still be a smaller number than 60, but it takes a lot of zeros to cut in over those 60s.

And if you've got a higher rate of 0s over 60s, then you may want to deeply reconsider your distribution network.

Oh, wait. We're talking fangames, not piracy itself.

Fangames are another matter entirely.

Do I think that Another Metroid 2 Remake deserved to be slapped down by Nintendo? No. It was a high quality, well written, loveletter to a game that has aged terribly, and that Nintendo could have remade at any point but chose not to because...well, when I picture the Nintendo offices, my mind tends towards things like the ending of Helious. For some context, here it is entirely out of context.

After all, if a fangame is utter crap, like so many people attempting to recreate Pokemon, and the uncountable crappy Mario games that peaked right around the GBA era, they will quickly be forgotten.

The reason AM2R was focused on was because not only was it released close to and compared to Nintendo's own efforts, (most people say that Federation Force is hot garbage), but because people have wanted to play Metroid 2, but couldn't because it was made before the era of color, maps, and physics that made sense.

The reason Pokemon Uranium was focused on was because it was edgy cringe, didn't make sense within the universe (Why would you need nuclear power in a world of magic creatures), and was the culmination of the most silly "fakemon" designs one could behold. What it had to show for the years of effort put into it was a very used crock of dung. That, and like most pokemon projects have a bizarre tendency to do there were open asks for donations which tends to set the flag off at the Nintendo office.

What did Sega do when a good fangame came their way? It depends on which office got word first mostly; but then Christian Whitehead happened and now he's working for Sega on Sonic Mania. When a bad Sonic fangame happens, they just shrug and ignore it. Have you seen a court go, "THIS SONIC NOT MADE BY SEGA IS THE ONE TRUE SONIC NOW."? No. You haven't.

The way I see it, fangames should be seen as a show of talent and there should be scouts looking for up and coming work. Shigeru isn't an immortal god king of video games.

As for eating into sales, again that's a no from me.

You're going to have to do LIGHT YEARS better than "This is piracy and it's illegal you asshole." Silence by the makers in question on getting the game uploaded to online in case it was taken down with no way to get back, "silence means approval" in other words, and while 227 and I might have different few points (I need to get back to him on that), it pretty much makes it safe that an abandoned game is safe for me to download. It's the end of the story. If you care so much about your abandoned game that nobody should pirate it, don't abandon it. It's the age where if physical media can't stay on the shelves for long, then digital media can. Unless you have licenses in the game and just so happen to be lazy instead of say take them out and keep selling the game, it is your problem. You talk as if the care they put into the game is so high, that people shouldn't keep them going out of respect. If they cared so much about the product they made, why did they pull it from sale? That's the million dollar question. The sad fact however is that people tend to care about these games sometimes even more than the developers and publishers. I can't owe Disney for Mickey Mouse in a game they ceased selling, I can't owe Codemasters and the car companies for a game they no longer sell. I can't owe Da Vinci for seeing Mona Lisa not because it's not sold, but also because he's no longer alive. Hah, aren't you so funny in this one. By 'something that isn't on sale', I mean the object itself is not on sale, permanently. Obviously closing times does not contribute one bit to that, as the object remains on sale. Yes I am. The burden lies on the holders if they do remain to say whether they remain up or stay down. That's what Nintendo does to the fangames. The fangame makers don't go to Nintendo to get permission; they already claim this work uses characters from Nintendo and is not for profit and rely on the fact that Nintendo would want free publicity over taking down games (unfortunately). In reality, almost every big company knows these sites. Their lawyers will do anything to take down the pirated copies. So why are they not taking any action against abandonware sites? You'd think if they go as far as ordering Google to take down search results to torrent sites or close entire torrent sites, that they'd chase after the abandonware sites. Now that you established that Monolith Productions is a Warner Bros subsidiary, why are they okay with this fansite hosting Captain Claw but not okay with new games being pirated? Obviously the publisher has the bigger word here. I never heard of anyone put in court for pirating an ages old game. But if that happened, I have the basis that the game is no longer for sale, meaning I can't buy it. If the abandonware site hosts say the original Doom which is still sold today but instead I have acquired Battlefield 1942 from them (now it's not on Origin, EA's direct storefront), it's not my problem. Finally, yes, nobody batting an eye towards abandonware content is enough of a claim. If a copy of Captain Claw put me in court and I got it from a fansite, can I really say "the makers of the game made interviews with the fansite I got it from so it is okay" and expect the judge to believe my claim? After all, the time I end up in court for Captain Claw is the time that Warner Bros or Monolith Productions decide I should end up in court.

It's not even that. Here's where his analogy really falls apart. When an object is stolen, it's gone. Someone lost it. There's the theft, and indeed it being on sale or not is not relevant. But when a game is pirated, no one loses a game. No person, store or company is short one copy. The only loss in case of piracy is the loss of potential profit from the same person otherwise buying the game. If the game is not on sale, then there is no possibility of making any profit, and therefore no profit to lose.

To be fair, he did say this:
Otherwise you are right. In the case of an abandoned game, a copy is made, and this copy doesn't affect the original in any way whatsoever. So even if you do break into a store during its overnight times in order to 'steal' a game, that's not the same thing as downloading an abandonware copy of a game.

Is Becky Anne Minsky a pirate?

She stole my heart.

Who? Even Google doesn't seem to know!

Here's where you make yourself look totally fucking stupid...

It's called piracy fucking idiot...
You cannot make a legal copy of something which doesn't belong to you...

This is where your analogy shows you are too stupid to fucking live.
I cannot believe there are so many immoral fucking assholes on this forum.
Not a single one of you can explain what gives you the right to "copy" this game...

You know why? Because you don't have one.

NOT ONCE has anyone shown why you have a license to the game.

How does a game not being immediately for sale make it yours to copy? It doesn't. The fact you totally fucking asshole pirate idiots think it does says a whole lot about your lack of character.

These games are still available for sale in second-hand stores like E-Bay. They were once for sale and frankly, still are now. But somehow the fact you cannot buy a "brand new" copy gives you the right to make your own for free? That somehow they immediately have no value when peopel are buying them for real money second-hand?

Bullshit! You are nothing but a bunch of fucking asshole idiots justifying talking whatever you want.

Fuck off scammers!

Pookamustard. You are a thief! Fuck off!
Breja, you are a thief. Fuck off!

All of you are as immoral as they come.

GoG! You should make a statement about this! Many of your forum goers are openly advocating piracy on your website. By their own claims, your silence on the matter legitimizes their piracy....


Codemasters gave away free licenses while they still had the right to do so! They did so legally per their purchased rights agreement. This is clearly not the same as you idiots taking the game for free with no rights whatsoever. The fact you can't get this through your head, shows how truly fucking stupid you are.

And now we take you live to RWarehall's press conference.

Not my fault you are a scamming pirate...
It should be entirely obvious to anyone with half a brain that abandonware sites do not have the legal rights to the games on their site. Thus, they cannot give you a license to play the games.

Fuck off scammer!
Seriously, not a single one of you can answer why you have a right to these games...

"It's not for sale, it's just a copy, so it doesn't hurt anyone" doesn't give you a right.
The truth is it does hurt someone. All these illegally distributed copies floating around dampens the market and means you are far less likely to see that title for sale on GoG updated for modern systems.

Your thievery has an impact that affects those of us with some scruples.

A book goes "out-of-print" awaiting more demand for another print run in a couple years. But you immoral jerks, think "out-of-print" means you can copy it for free. Makes zero sense. But I guess that's what happens when some of you are so obviously brain-damaged...

Breja is a thief!

You wanna know why? Because he stole...because he stole...umm...because he stole RW's temper I guess? Why is Breja a thief again? Oh no, my brain's gonna short circuit pretty soon...

You better go all-caps, RW, cuz this is SERIOUS!!! LOL

I have Scruples!