On Wed, 11 Mar 2020 at 17:46, Paul Koning via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > A company may close down, but that doesn't mean it is "gone" as far as its > property is concerned. Ownership passes to others, perhaps creditors or the > like, or the majority shareholder. Who that is may be quite hard to find > out, which of course is unfortunate if you're trying to get proper permission > to do stuff with that property.
Indeed so. AIUI this is the case with Symbolics OpenGenera. The company went broke, the domain name sold off, all employees terminated, etc... They don't trade or sell anything. But the new owners will not permit use of copies of the OS on emulators, or any other form of distribution. In the ZX Spectrum world, which is probably beneath the attention of most listmembers but is a thriving and active retrocomputing/hobbyist world and probably one of the single most active areas in the whole hobby, a lot of games' copyrights belong to companies that no longer exist. In a few cases, they have been bought, and vanishingly few are still trading. Rare (now a MICROS~1 subsidiary) evolved from 1980s outfit Ultimate Play The Game. Rainbird was owned by BT. In many cases, original authors of games have been located, and where applicable, if the software publishing company no longer exists, the authors assert that copyright returned to them and they explicitly allow free distribution. But if some vestige of the company survives, owned by another, which in turn is owned by another, which in turn is owned by another -- nobody knows enough about it or will take responsibility to sign off on making the 30-40y old software free. :-( -- Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk – gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven – Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 – ČR (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053
