Should unreleased/out of print material be legal to download or copy?

For example, take the TPATH video Pack Up the Plantation. It was released on VHS in 1985 I believe. However its since gone out of print. Should it be legal to upload/download it on bittorrent or make a copy of it to mail to a friend? There are also quite a few videos that have never even been released commercially although I assume they were on TV at some point.

Or a lot of those older computer games. Some game publishers have gone out of business but the games are still technically illegal to download although nobody is losing any sales from it (except maybe the people who sell used games).

Assume for this purpose that if it is rereleased it will fall back under copyright laws.

Also this is just about unreleased/out of print stuff. Not material that is currently available to purchese.

Short answer -definitely yes. Slightly more complicated answer - it's going to happen anyway, because there will be no way to stop it as technology and use of information technology continues to develop, so even trying to make it illegal is not worth it, even if enough people did hold value systems where they would really want to do so.

Not sure. I think a vast majority of these issues would be resolved if we could get unified, sane, copyright laws. (In the US corporations are now considered individuals for copyright so the whole 'open use after 70 years' clause goes right out of the window.)

I personaly feel that although it is still illegal to distribute copyrighted material, there should be some recourse if the material is out-of-print, or similar circumstances. Case point is the Dune Encyclopedia book. I would be more than happy to buy it from a distributor, but I'm not going to shell out an exorbitant price off Ebay.

So yeah, the issue is poorly implemented copyright laws which need to be fixed.

You should be able to download/copy/etc. something if there is no other possible way to acquire it.

It will never be legal because a company will never want to give up on a copyright, and I believe the current way copyright laws are written means that if they give up on one (allow you to download it for free), it means that they can't use it ever again to make money. And with all these re-makes of movies and games and whatever, they want to hold on to all their properties.

Besides, if they ever offer them up for download, that would mean that they'd have to offer tech support as well, patches, etc. That means money.

Of course you'll never get fined in any sort of way for downloading a 20 year old game, so you might as well go ahead and do it.

Here is a list of threads you've already made on this subject:

Hypothetical Situations about Copyright
Should unreleased material be not-subject to copyright laws?
Copyright Vultures
Legalities of Distributing Discontinued Freeware
Abandonware