Hi Michael, > How about games made for the Tandy Color Computer 3 by Diecom Products? > That company is now defunct and has been for a very long time. You > can download disk images of Guantlet II. Is that really illegal?
As the company is defunct, it is unlikely that they will sue you. But maybe they sold their rights to another company and that one might be interested in getting some money out of you. Or maybe the individual developers now hold the copyright. As long as you have no official statement which makes the once commercial code free, it is not free. Simple. > MS-DOS and Windows 3.x are clearly abandonware. If I want to > use this abandonware, am I suddenly breaking the law? Not suddenly. It is and was breaking the law. Of course you can hope that MS is too busy hunting people who steal Vista, but you cannot just say that stealing MS DOS is suddenly legal... > Busting Grandma for downloading a commercial song she bought > a CD of at the local store is a travesty. Yet it happens quite often that some "big industry" sues some "harmless small copying" just because they can. I know people who had to pay 100s of Euros for having a picture on their non- commercial private homepage without paying for the rights... The right holder turned out to be a lawyer who apparently had a lot of time to google around and extort amateurs. There was no chance to avoid the fine by just removing the picture after the lawyer complained. Those things just do not work based on what is FAIR. They work based on LAW and there are enough people who do not care about moral rights as long as law gives them money. Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensign option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
