Discovery going Standalone / hosting Freelancer.ISO on our site

[Alley]

Surely we have someone around here with legal knowledge.

If this doesn't become a thing, it would be a good idea to include information on how to get the game in the mod download, maybe in the disco installer, and we should really have some community hosted torrents of it.

It's very simple: Freelancer is abandonware.

However abandonware is not a legal status, it's rather something that showed up on its own back in the day when tech companies either discarded products or simply shut down. On a legal standpoint, we would need Microsoft to renounce all of their rights regarding the Freelancer franchise, which will never happen.

It is however true Microsoft stopped giving a damn, and to put it in perspective not too long ago some of us got in touch with a Microsoft employee that himself was unable to gather the slightest information regarding Freelancer.

I believe it's worth a shot from the moment vanilla and singleplayer are unavailable. In the event there is a legal inquiry regarding this, it would actually be a great opportunity rather than trouble. Taking down a link is not a problem for us, it's a matter of seconds. However it would be a great opportunity to force Microsoft/Their legal representative to explain the current status of the Freelancer franchise. It's even doubtful they would do anything in the first place as this is a dead franchise that does not generate any money. Setting up a case, even just internally, would cost more money than any possible benefit.

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Alley was right.