Sadly, Crack dot Com is no more. The domain name has been owned by various pharmaceutical and search pages over the years, and both of the company's founders have moved on to other things. Through the wonders of archive.org, the following information can be found.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030610094112/abuse2.com/public_domain.php3 wrote:
Is Abuse Public Domain?
The source code, artwork, and shareware levels (1-4) are public domain. This means you are free to copy, sell, or modify it with no restrictions. To get this point across you can do the following:
1. You can write a book about games and include the data on CD with the book. Some people have done this already.
2. You can put the data on a FTP or web site without asking permission to do so. People have done this many times as well.
3. You can make your own game based off of the Abuse source and artwork and sell it as your own. As noted below you can't call the game Abuse or Abuse 2 because the name is trademarked.
Data that is not public domain:
1. The sound effects in Abuse are owned by Bobby Prince (contact
http://bpmusic.com). Since we do not own them we cannot make them public domain, but you should not have a problem using them in most cases. Besides they are 8bit 11khz, games these days are expected to have higher quality.
2. The levels with commercial Abuse (4+) are not public domain. We did not make them public domain because some stores are still selling the game.
The readme file in the source code wrote:
Crack dot Com is hereby releasing the source code to Abuse to the public domain.
Ownership:
The following are statements of Crack dot Com's ownership. These
items are NOT being submitted to the public domain.
Crack dot Com retains ownership of the Abuse trademark.
Crack dot Com retains ownership of the Crack dot Com trademark.
Crack dot Com retains ownership of the Abuse "retail" data set.
Crack dot Com retains ownership of the Abuse "registered" data set.
The "retail" and "registered" data sets are defined as the levels, sound effects, music, artwork and other data which are NOT common to the "shareware" release of the game.
Licenses and Third Party Owners:
Crack licensed the DOS Abuse rights to Electronic Arts and the Mac Abuse rights to Bungie. Crack is therefore NOT releasing the full data set to the public domain to protect EA's and Bungie's investments in the product.
Sound effects found in the shareware release of Abuse are the copyright of Bobby Prince and are not being submitted to the public domain.
So, what exactly is the status of Abuse? It's not shareware because the registered version is no longer sold. It's not public domain because there are some limitations in the license. Bobby Prince (best known for his work for Apogee and id) owns the sound effects, and the retail and registered data sets aren't being released because distribution rights to the full version were licensed to EA and Bungie. It seemed most accurate, and least confusing, to simply say that the game is freeware.
Now then, EA probably doesn't own licensing rights in perpetuity. If Dave Taylor and Jonathan Clark were smart about it, they probably placed an expiry date on the license so that it would have to be renewed someday. I don't know if the details of the licensing agreements were ever disclosed, but they probably weren't, or couldn't be without EA and Bungie's permission.
As usual, the best hope for getting information, or permission to distribute the registered version, is to contact the owners. Dave Taylor is currently vice president of Naked Sky Entertainment. The reason why I took so long to add Abuse to the website is because I tried to contact either Dave or Jonathan (I'm not at the computer that I sent the email from right now) an email about a year ago and didn't get a response. I may have done something dumb like email one of their old crack.com addresses. At any rate, I didn't get a response, and the uncertainty about the game's status delayed its addition to the site. A number of games that were delayed for that reason have recently been added because, well, I don't care any more! If I can't get the registered version, I'll just add the shareware version for now and work on getting the rest later!
So, I'll see if I can get an answer from Dave Taylor, since I know where his website is, but he's probably a busy man. Worth a shot.
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