A few months ago I got an urge to revisit my childhood and play old PC games… really old PC games, like Monkey Island.
I found sites specializing in “abandonware”- older games no longer produced and/or marketed by the developers.
Now, the sites all seemed to be in or expecting legal trouble; what exactly is the legal status of abandonware, and can I expect to sued for using it?
Thanks 
Still don’t know if the… VGIAA? is coming after me though 
I’ve a supplementary question:
A lot of the claims to legitimacy of abandonware seem to depend on saying “the owners of the copyright went bankrupt long ago, therefore it’s not clear if anyone actually holds the copyright, therefore it’s probably ok to copy it.”
What in fact happens to the copyrights held by a company if the firm goes bankrupt? In most cases, these will be considered part of the assets of the company and be sold to pay creditors, or be directly handed over to creditors. But is it credible that the copyrights could go missing or be lost, i.e. that they are not assigned to anyone or owned by anyone?
Copyright is ALWAYS owned by someone. You cant accidentally let it go. You have to intentionally move something out of copyright.
Anyway, the way I see it is that while its technically illegal, unless someone cares enough to ask people to stop doing it, its okay. Technically, recording videos on your VCR and lending it to a friend is alos illegal but nobody is going to crack down on this sort of thing.
Shalmanese is right. In the case of, say, Monkey Island, you’re PROBABLY on safe ground – the game was released by PCGAMER on a CD that came with their magazine a couple years ago. Therefore, you could claim that the game has been released as shareware, and that you personally can’t get hit for anything.
However, copyright is ALWAYS owned by someone, if it exists at all. If a game company goes under, the copyright either reverts to a specific individual (the owner of the company), or to a given creditor who winds up with the thing as a result of liquidation of assets to pay debts.
The only “uncertainty” that can crop up here would be when a creditor does not realize that he owns the copyright… or when a specific “owner” (a stockholder, perhaps) either doesn’t realize he owns the copyright… or doesn’t feel like spending his own money to defend in court his rights to a prehistoric video game that he will never make another cent off of.
“Monkey Island” falls into that category, to some extent. Its copyright is quite clear (LucasArts, as I recall), but considering that the game is ancient, no one really wants to buy it, and Lucasfilms isn’t really into exploiting the characters…
…it’s probably safe enough, even if it WASN’T shareware. The people likely to get busted and sued are the people DISTRIBUTING the thing, not the people downloading it. It’s just not economically feasible at this point to go hunt down every single person who downloads a given item, copyright or no copyright. The best you can hope to do is to sue the DISTRIBUTING sites into oblivion, and scare everyone badly enough that they won’t open distribution sites of their own.
Record companies, take note.
Also note that if the game contained Star Wars characters, LucasArts would be MUCH more likely to sue, if only to make it clear that THEY own Luke Skywalker, and that they will brook no challenge to their ownership of said characters. Disney is famous for suing day care centers for painting Mickey Mouse on their walls, for exactly this reason… not because they’re jerks, but because they HAVE to defend those copyrights… or risk losing them.
Minor correction: Disney sues over Mickey Mouse not to preserve a copyright interest but to preserve a trademark interest. Copyrights are not diluted by the failure to defend them (at least not until such failure because so pervasive as to create a common belief of general consent), but the failure to defend a trademark kills it almost instantly.
Please keep your types of intellectual property straight.
IDSA and they’d most likely go after the supplier. The more reputable abandonware sites have pulled the download links to all software that belongs to IDSA members and instead urge visitors to contact each IDSA member in hopes they either start selling their software again or make it public domain.
For what it’s worth, all four Monkey Island games are available, or at least they were last year. Monkey Island 1 and 2 came bundled with an extra as “Monkey Island Madness” with the purchase of the discounted $15 release of Monkey Island 3.
…and to follow up asterion, just about every game LucasArts has ever made is still available.
Now excuse me, I need to go buy a copy of Sam and Max Hit The Road.