Last Updated on January 19, 2026 by Dave Farquhar
The concept of abandonware does not exist anywhere in copyright law, although there seems to be a perception that it does. In this blog post, we will explore the idea, why it exists, and why it persists.
Copyright exists to allow creators to profit from their work. Some of the specific have changed over the years, including the process of registration, the duration, and whether you need to renew it. The whole process is simpler now than it used to be. Basically, if you created it, it’s yours for 95 years unless you assign the copyright to someone else. For example, I claim copyright on all of my blog posts. But I have also written at various times for my current and certain former employer. If I’m on the clock, the copyright goes to my employer.
Prior to 1998, there were some examples of copyrighted work falling into the public domain because of clerical errors. This sometimes included not using the correct format for the copyright message, not renewing a copyright, or not registering a copyright properly. In a few rare cases, a trailer for a particular movie fell into the public domain because the producer didn’t register the copyright for the trailer separately. So the trailer was in the public domain even though the corresponding movie remained copyrighted. The movie trailer for the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove is one noteworthy example.
The problem of out of print work
Some things stay in print essentially forever. It is difficult to imagine a time when The Beatles’ studio albums will go out of print. Most likely, they will remain commercial viable until they start falling into the public domain because of expired copyright.
But most creators aren’t The Beatles. A large amount of the music I listened to in the late 1980s and early 1990s, potentially a majority of them, are out of print and have been for a long time. Animal Logic, the self-titled debut album from a band formed in 1989 that included Police drummer Stewart Copeland, is an example I ran across recently. Ric Ocasek, the co-frontman of The Cars, recorded solo record in 1986, This Side of Paradise, that included a top-40 hit, Emotion in Motion. That’s all out of print too. So even members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame aren’t immune to work being out of print and at least somewhat forgotten.
And computer software, particularly video games, have a tendency to go out of print, sometimes very quickly. And I’d rate the odds of most of them coming back into print as being lower than the likelihood of Animal Logic coming back.
The moral argument for abandonware
The moral argument for calling out of print work abandonware and copying it is that you aren’t really hurting anyone. I could wait for a copy of Animal Logic, and I could pay the going rate for it, whether that is $5 or $30, but the members of the band won’t see a penny of that. They received a royalty when the record was first released. Legally, if I own a physical copy, I can convert it MP3 and be free and clear. And if I don’t, and I simply download someone else’s copy, then I have broken the law, even though it doesn’t help the band in either case. The one thing copyright law is doing is capping the number of people who own copies at the same number of units sold.
Similarly, if I pirate a copy of Beauty and the Beast, an Intellevision game by Imagic that was a mashup of Donkey Kong, Popeye, and Crazy Climber, I don’t hurt anyone. It’s probably Microsoft who owns the copyright at this point, but it’s highly unlikely they have any idea. It’s an obscure video game for a video game console that was discontinued in 1984, and it was an afterthought when Activision acquired a former rival, and it became an even bigger afterthought as time went on and Activision went through subsequent mergers and acquisitions.
Atari might want to acquire it, but Microsoft might wonder if it’s even worth their time to determine if Atari is talking to the right people.
Mergers often cause abandonware. Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm is one example. Kevin O’Leary‘s entire business model is another.
Examples of abandonware helping the creator
Piracy can also prove there’s demand for something. The proto-punk band Death is a good example. It was piracy of their rare 1975 single Politicians in My Eyes/Keep on Knocking that caused a record label to go looking for the band members in the early 2010s and ask if they had any more material. It resulted in them getting a record deal and finally getting some deserved recognition for their work. If it hadn’t been for punk rock fans treating their music as abandonware and pirating it, those master tapes would probably be still sitting, forgotten, in Bobby Hackney’s attic.
The German New Wave band Fex and their song Subways of your Mind, formerly known as The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, is a more recent example. Fex broke up in 1988 after five years of relative obscurity. Seventeen years of pirating a radio recording of Subways of your Mind led to a reunion and re-release after the band was identified, and today they’re bigger than they ever were in the 80s.
Morally, abandonware is a gray area for certain. But it’s not a legal gray area, unless maybe you’re a megacorporation training an AI.
Is 95 years too long?
There is an argument that 95-year copyright terms do more harm than good. Every idea comes from somewhere, so at some point, creators owe it to society to give it back to humanity to do what they will with it. At one time, that was just 34 years. Under our original copyright laws in the United States, anything published before 1990 would be free to copy now. Not only would that include anything recorded by The Beatles while all four members were still alive, it would also include Nine Inch Nails’ debut album, Pretty Hate Machine, and Nirvana’s debut album, Bleach.
But corporations don’t like to give up profits. The entire reason copyright were extended to 95 years was because Disney wanted to keep the first Mickey Mouse movie from falling into the public domain, and they had a sympathetic member of Congress, a 1960s pop singer named Sonny Bono, who wanted his descendants to be able to profit off the songs he recorded with Cher for millennia to come. 95 years was the compromise against Sonny Bono’s hard line stance of forever minus one day.
AI wants abandonware, and more
Copyrights usually prohibit storing plain text in an information retrieval system. And that poses a problem for a certain class of corporations today. Artificial intelligence is a really big deal. But the whole idea of artificial intelligence is to feed a computer an endless supply of human created work, and have it produce derivative works. Everything about the process violates copyright. That is, unless you limit yourself to training AIs on works whose copyrights have expired–generally material that’s 95 years old.
Nobody in the AI industry wants that limitation. It limits the cultural relevance of the AI, not to mention completely neutering any scientific usefulness the AI could have. In 1928, jet engines and nuclear fusion were still purely theoretical concepts.
The right answer is for copyright law to be revisited and made more like it was prior to 1998. My fear is that certain exceptions will be put in place for AI but not for anything else. We will see.
Abandonware and Atari
So the idea of abandonware doesn’t give me any animosity toward Atari for acquiring long forgotten retro video games and finding ways to re-release them and profit off them. I would rather Atari make money off it and give me the opportunity to buy those things again than for them to languish until sometime in my great grandchildren’s lifetime, long after I’m gone. By then, it’s possible no existing copies would remain. Preservationists are still finding forgotten titles on failing media today, and when they make copies of them, technically they are breaking the law. But if they didn’t break the law, the work would likely be lost forever within a few years.
Abandonware is piracy. But that isn’t to say zero good comes out of piracy. In some cases, the pirated copies are all we have left.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Spider Robinson’s take on the subject : http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
I’m surprised you didn’t mention “Night of the Living Dead”(1968) where the films distributed to theaters failed to include a copyright notice. Certainly when it came out it was a commercial failure, but because small theater owners would play it again and again (particularly because it was a time before VCRs or cheap home recording) it became a classic. Somewhat ironically, the “restored” version(s) of the film does have copyright. There were remakes 1990 and recently in 2021. George Romereo is probably thankful, I’m sure he owes a lot to this mistake for his career, or at least lengthening his career and increasing his reputation. BTW although Disney was interested in protecting the Mouse, the more impending “danger” was to Winnie-the-Pooh, and that’s why they got Sonny Bono Act passed at that particular time. A beloved British Children’s book! Considering “copyright” was explicitly made to encourage inventors and artists, that Act certainly wasn’t in that spirit. Europe has(had?) less lengthy copyrights, and Elvis’ recordings are in the European public domain. Another consequence of the internet is that if copyright expires anywhere in the world; that kinda makes it publicly available, if not literally in the public domain in specific regions. On the software front, it wasn’t until 1984 Apple vs Franklin Computer that software was ruled to be covered by US copyright. Franklin’s lawyers argued that copyright law only covered “human readable” texts, and they lost, both in terms of firmware and for software generally. IBM previously settled with companies that pirated their BIOS, perhaps they were afraid that court rulings wouldn’t necessarily be in their favor, or at least leave some loopholes (what if raw code was covered, but not binaries! IBM would’ve had to spend a lot lobbying Congress for new laws!). The first season of “Halt and Catch Fire” took a lot of liberties, for example IBM never confronted Compaq with lawyers, they knew Compaq was in the clear with reverse engineering. Except for the Dallas location, the inspiration was “Corona Data Systems”, not Compaq, and they did copy PC’s BIOS.The critics kept going with “it’s a remix of the story of Compaq Portable Computer”. Also, another computer company, “Columbia Data Products” did a legal reverse engineer of IBM’s BIOS before Compaq, they just weren’t commercially successful. So is abandonware still “piracy”? I’d liken it more to “Privateering”, like when the English sponsored ships to “requisition” the property of Spanish and other competing seafaring nations. Perhaps it is morally questionable, but when the laws aren’t enforced equally to all people… Ahoy me maties!