Week 6: Abandonware ethics and copyright

Digital preservation, copyright, abandonware and responsible archival access — and the ambiguity that runs through all of it

12 April 2027

“Abandonware” is not a legal category. A game with no current owner still has a copyright somewhere, held by whoever inherited a publisher’s assets — often nobody who can be found, sometimes somebody who very much can. This week lays out where that leaves you: what emulation is settled law, what distributing a ROM or an old installer is not, and what “responsible archival access” means in practice when you’re relying on a preservation community’s upload rather than your own dumped hardware.

This course does not encourage distributing copyrighted material, and your field report should never need to. The line it does ask you to hold: work from what you can access responsibly, document where it came from, and be honest in your report about the parts of the chain you can’t verify.

Outline#

• copyright doesn’t expire just because a publisher did
• abandonware, emulation, and ROM distribution: three different legal questions
• responsible archival access, and how to cite where an artifact came from
• Field Report due this week — 40%