Unlike copyright, trademark has a practicing provision. If Disney doesn't actually sell products under the Maniac Mansion trademark then any competitor can just snap it up. The filing is practically meaningless if they aren't doing something with the property (the threat of being litigated to death by the Disney legal team is far scarier than the actual legal weight of a lapsed trademark). While it might be precautionary, they must at very least be considering practicing the IP.

it depends on if Disney is interested in partnering with GOG.com, i have no idea if they are or not.

I hope they are. My feeling is if GOG can get Wizardry, they can get LucasArts as well.

They simply to show up at Disney headquarters and sing this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99Op1TaXmCw

Well if Steam sells these games, I don't see why we can't sell them here. Here's hoping the situation will eventually change.

They were so anal about it they changed the files around so the Steam versions didn't work in ScummVM. Whoever was running LucasArts was obviously not up for DRM free releases.

I would guess now that Disney owns the whole catalog they find it beneath their interest.

I believe the OP meant to say that legally Abandonware doesn't exist, which is right... Regardless of whether people speak of such concept as though it existed, as long as it doesn't appear in any law anywhere it just won't exist. And currently no laws say that after a ceirtain number of years/if a publisher stops selling a software product you can download it for free. It isn't prosecuted, but if the companies decided to do so it would go to court as good old piracy.

A pity, I'd buy them here, not on Steam. I wonder if DRM is the reason why they are on Steam but not here.

UPDATE: Just saw the post from StingingVelvet about Steam versions which don't work with Scummvm - that stinks. I guess Lucasarts indeed were DRM addicts. But Disney is known to be DRM addict as well, so this might be not for the better.

I didn't know that, Wow that is completely screwed up. FU Mickey.

That's exactly what I meant, the way the abandonware phrase is commonly used doesn't really exist. If a companies okay with it being put out for free, like GOG did with Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky and so on, the game really becomes Freeware. There was even a site around at one time that was famous (or should that be infamous) for so called abandonware and they admitted that it was at the very best a grey term and had no legal standing. They did host some of these games but at the same time did say that if the company or rights holders came along and said it wasn't on, they would remove them.

The same has happened with TV shows getting rereleases that use popular music. TV shows like Heartbeat, Tour of Duty, Cold Case either never get released on DVD or are altered due to the nightmare that is music publishing rights.

It doesn't exist as a legal concept but it is certainly a term with meaning and things that apply to it. Whether you like it or not many games can never be re-released for various reasons and abandonware is the only way to make them available for history.

The trouble is, that many people use this term as a justification for piracy and say, oh its abandonware, when so such legal term exists. Let's face it, prior to GOG, how many of these games would you think would ever have been rereleased? The fact remains though that these games are often the property of a person, or a company. A prime example is I have no Mouth and I must scream. As far as I'm aware, short of paying inflated prices on somewhere like Ebay there is no legal, and thats the kicker here, way of getting it because Harlan Ellison wont authorise a rerelease for reasons known only to himself.

There are plenty of games I'd like to see rereleased, two main ones being EA's Sherlock Holmes adventures as I still find them superior in terms of storyline to the Frogwares games.