And then, it wasn't abandon anymore...

I’m a fan of pirate literature and games. I even have my own collection which includes the whole MI series, Sid Meier’s Pirates! Gold and some other goodies…

Well, some months ago I downloaded full Sea Legends from the Underdogs site. It is (was) abandonware so it is (was) OK to get it. I enjoyed it a lot, but I eventually had to format my HD and I don’t have a CD-RW drive so I Sea Legends had to go.

Now, a few months later, I miss the game so much I go after it. I go into the underdogs, and when I’m going to click the magic link saying “here (??? mb)”, it has become “buy it from the software society”.

I HATE PEOPLE WHO GET ABANDONWARE AND PUT IT INTO THEIR COPYRIGHTS!!!

Sons of a bitch.

edit: they put “extreme hard to find” in its title. It is a Dos game and they say it’s also for Win 95/98.

That was downright indecent… These days, we can’t have fun with the classics, because people still try to enforce copyright even if they stopped making them ages ago. Where are we supposed to get them?!

It’s more than that. They stole the game from another company.

WHOA! How dirty can they get?! At this rate, maybe they’ll do the same to UFO, TFTD and Tyrian sooner than we can imagine.
But they have to be pretty dumb to steal the copyright of a game that is no longer made or sold. What do they expect to do with it?! Most of those games will never have sequels.

Actually, they did it to Tyrian too…

You know,they don’t lose any money by getting copyrights over abandonware, and they have a chance to make money out of it, so…

No wonder it was so hard to find… I had been looking for it for years, until I stumbled into that old site I had visited long ago, which had the game right there.
Still, stealing the rights for someone else’s work after it becomes abandonware is pretty dirty. After all, many people love the classics, and stealing the copyright won’t get them remade, it will only make things difficult for fans who want a taste of their old favorites.

We should be able to pirate those games anyway, since… well, they ARE about pirates. :slight_smile:

Okay, I’m sorry.

Seriously, that sucks. I’ve always respected the Underdogs, even though I used to loathe them because of their incessant popups. I personally feel that distributing games which are so old they are no longer being sold is justified. But there is no excuse for making money off of the work of others.

If you mean the undergods, then I figure they use those popups to pay for their bandwith & hosting. If you mean the Software Society, I wish that company’s owners die in a terrorist attack.

I mean the Underdogs, not for their popups (which is an understandable method of getting revenue to run their free service)… but for the fact that they <i>link</i> to the Software Society instead of something free. Unless the Software Society used to be free, and just recently changed… which would leave the Underdogs blameless.

Sea Legends was abandonware and you could get it for free with the underdogs. Now a company named Software Society claimed Copyright over Sea Legends, a game that they did not make, and since they hold the copyrights, the underdogs can’t host the full game anymore since it would be piracy. That’s what happened.

They have a policy of showing people good games even if they are not free. So they keep a link to those that must be bought. But most things there are free for download still.

But see… the Underdogs still link to them. This they should not do. But I guess the Software Society is more to blame.

What worries me the most is that some sharks are lurking around the Underdogs & some other abandonware sites, claiming copyrights over some games. I don’t know when it started but since I found out about it I’m really mad.

This is a complete outrage! In a few years, when someone decides to make sequels of those games or pick up the same storyline, those sharks will try to cash in on the copyright and make obscene profits out of other people’s hard work.

I still love Underdogs. However, I think I saw Sea Legends in a store a week ago. It’s no longer abandonware, I’m afraid. Then again, I might be wrong, and Software Society should die slow, agonizing deaths, but I’m fairly certain I’m not.

So. If I claim copyright over a lot of abandonware games I did not make; not only can I get a lot of people enraged, I might also get rich? I finally found a way to earn money during the holidays. WooH.

Software Society is evil; in the non-good way.