Scott Alfter wrote:
There are also copyright questions in either case (not that again! :-) ), but I think that while there's a case to be made that making copyrighted abandonware freely available is a public service of sorts and falls into a moral/ethical gray area, a similar case can't be made for selling someone else's abandonware. That, IMHO, is more black than gray.
Needless to say I'm not a lawyer.. and I don't want to start a flame war. But here is an example.
Mr. X walks by a landfill and sees a few Apple 2s ready to be dumped. He picks them up, blows the dust off and offers for sale on e-bay.
I don't think anyone would have a moral problem here, and it's not very different than offering someone else's IP that would be lost otherwise.
-Alex.