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The Underdogs

As for the conflict between the IDSA and Home of the Underdogs, Achavanuntakul recalls that the IDSA contacted her, demanding that she remove their members' copyrighted games. "I asked the IDSA to help be a conduit between myself and their members and asked for some clarifications on the copyrights of some games, but I never got any response," says Achavanuntakul.

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Could abandonware be a way to call attention to underrated games?
Achavanuntakul was asked if abandonware is the same as warez, as the IDSA's Lowenstein asserts, and this provoked some interesting and tough words. "Certainly not. Warez site operators do not care at all whether companies are still making money from their games--they distribute new, still-sold titles, thereby hurting the companies directly and costing [the game industry] millions of dollars." She continues, "Abandonware sites, on the other hand, exist only to preserve out-of-print games their creators no longer make any money from and, in many cases, no longer care enough to even support or record in any way."

"Contrary to what many people claim, abandonware isn't invented merely as a way to rationalize piracy--every honest abandonware webmaster recognizes the illegality of distributing copyrighted software. They just do it out of love for oldies, and they think of themselves more as game historians than criminals," says Achavanuntakul. "As a die-hard gamer and collector, I think it's ironic and even a little disheartening that abandonware webmasters, who take it upon themselves to preserve out-of-print oldies and hence their history (i.e. doing the job the companies themselves should be doing), are often prosecuted and treated no better than warez operators."

"Abandonware sites exist only to preserve out-of-print games their creators no longer make any money from and, in many cases, no longer care enough to even support."

Achavanuntakul continues: "If you look at other forms of entertainment, you will see that they are being very well preserved. We have Project Gutenberg for books, numerous archives for movies, and even efforts to preserve the Web itself. "Games, like electronic media, face a much greater threat of disappearing--books can be reprinted infinitely, and movies and music can be stored and transferred seamlessly as we move from, say, LPs to cassettes, to CDs, and now MP3--but old games and software in general don't have that advantage. How many computers nowadays, for example, even ship with a 5.25-inch drive? How many Windows machines can run DOS games?

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How would you play this classic, otherwise?
"You don't have to wait 75 years for copyrights to expire to run them--even 10 years is enough to make many games obsolete. I have a team of fellow enthusiasts who even 'crack' self-booting 5.25-inch games so that they can run on new Pentium computers, and there is a lot of effort being made by programmers, working without pay in their free time, to create a DOS emulator for new versions of Windows to run old DOS games.

"What are we doing this for? Why are we risking our necks doing something that we could be sued for, like copyright infringement?" Achavanuntakul says it's her hope that one day the companies will appreciate the efforts that she and her fellow abandonware webmasters are making--that they'll look beyond the legal issue and become interested enough to help.

"It's their creations we are trying to preserve, after all."


 
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