One of the most respected abandonware sites on the internet, the Abandoned Gamesroom, has been providing users with downloads of Sierra and LucasArts games for quite a number of years, and users had the opportunity to vote in an on-line poll, asking them what game do they want to be put up next. Today, the Gamesroom no longer exists; not because of the ever-increasing traffic, but it has been busted by the ESA, due to copyright violations.

U.S. copyright law states that "copyrights owned by corporations are valid for 95 years from the date of first publication", meaning that we won't be seeing a video game have its copyright expired any time soon. Half-Life 2 was made in 2004, for example. If Vivendi doesn't shut down or they sell the game rights to another company, then HL2's copyright, as well as games that were released in 2004, won't expire until 2099. The legal mumbo-jumbo of it all is ridiculous, because we wouldn't exist by then.

The Gamesroom will be back, but only as a "fan site". I suspect that it would be the old one -- minus the downloads.

Well, we can be sure that the ESA did not act on its own in shutting down the site, I'm sure that either Sierra and/or LucasArts initiated the movement against the site. They were offering titles that were actually for sale by these companies, and that isn't really abandonware. Hopefully this kind of thing just happens to the sites that are offering commercial games that are still available, and not to sites that offer true abandonware.

Isn't HL2 owned by Valve?

Valve developed it. Vivendi owns the rights to it.

err are you sure about this?

Vivendi don't even publish it anymore. It's EA now (GOTY Edition).

And besides I don't think Vivendi would let them release it through Steam if they had owned it.