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[A. J. Raffles]

Originally posted by BLZ@Sep 19 2005, 06:21 PM
Let me ask this, how many have actually been sued from hosting games that haven't been sold in stores for over 10 years? Do you really think any company is going to go through the trouble to sue someone over something they don't make money for? I cna understand Vivendi going after people pirating Half-Life 2, but not an 13 year old MS-DOS game. (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I've never seen any suits for games/software this old.)

You probably weren't there when it happened, but ESA's threat to have Abandonia shut down for good was very real. I'm sure you're aware that abandonware is a slightly dodgy business, but Abandonia's line has always been to avoid those sort of confrontations. It's Kosta's decusion, obviously, since he's the one who would be held responsible if there was a lawsuit; it might not have affected you and me (apart from the fact that we would have had to find a different site to get our games from), but Kosta as the site owner could very well have had a lawsuit for breach of copyright, or whatever it is, on his hands.
The only reason why ESA won't let everybody who wishes to host those games do so is that they are paid by the companies that own the rights to those games (i.e. Vivendi and a bunch of others). If Vivendi really didn't care about those games at all, surely they wouldn't pay an organisation to protect their copyrights?