Stark wrote:Since this is essentially taking something from an owner, I expected you to have a pretty profound reason as to why this was necessary to be codified in law.
While I agree with you on the specific point of losing copyright due to lack of support/availability, which is just a legal nightmare for all concerned, I do not agree on software copyright in general.
Copyright is not ownership, although certainly a lot of media industry propaganda talks like that. Copyright is a monopoly on reproduction granted to rights holders by society as a whole and enforced through the legal system backed up by use of force by the state. We allow artists to demand that the police imprison anyone making copies of their work, because we believe that doing so will be better for everyone in the long run. We judge that the increase in production of intellectual property, and to a lesser extent the wellbeing of the creators, is worth stripping everyone else of the ability to make copies, of making the IP unavailable to people who can't afford it, of chilling progress and removing the ability to reuse and remix content into new works. 'Moral rights of the authors' is a canard, there is no fundamental moral right to stop other people from enjoying or even profiting from your work, this is a constant fact of life for a whole plethora of things not covered by copyright.
IMHO copyright is ok in principle but the terms have been ludicrously biased in favour of creators and away from the maximum benefit to the general population by decades of lobbying. 95 years for all works is ludicrous. For computer software, 20 years is completely sensible. Arguably ten years is more than sufficient to maintain production of new works, since no one thinks about revenues after five years when budgeting development of a computer game. Yes indefinite copyright allows some companies to make a little more money on their back catalogue, but I don't think there is a compelling argument that this improves the rate and quality of new game creation enough to burden everyone with the costs of compliance (and yes, make a lot of games only available through illegal channels, dimminishing the force of law itself through pervasive violation). Or are you seriously claiming that if abandonware was legal EA would be unwilling or unable to make as many new games?
Amusingly, your demands for free software would have prevented GOG even existing, so you using it and desiring its products to be free must be trolling too. 
