A-EON Technology Acquires Personal Paint

[psxphill]

If so it seems this falls under the title "Abandonware" in my book.

Abandonware has no basis in law. It's stealing, like if you see anyone elses processions not being used (like for instance a car or a house) and decide to take it.

The question here then is if the readme file included in the archive constitutes such a license, and if not, what license did "Aminet internet archives" (whatever organization or person that means) agree to? They should have had a lawyer write this thing.

If it doesn't constitute a license then every single distribution of it was illegal.

I beg to differ, at least by any common definition of freeware. The software was distributed free of charge. Freeware. That's not to say that this makes any difference legally when it comes to copyright.

Freeware is just slang for distributing for $0.00, companies are allowed to vary the price at any time. The shop that gave you a free sample yesterday, doesn't have to give you a free sample today.

[psxphill]

It's different.
First of you can't compare it to taking someone elses car/house since you are using a copy of it, it's not anyone taking your house/car it's just a clone of it, I wouldn't care if anymone made a replica of my unused car/house in the other side of the world.

You can compare it, because in both cases you're depriving someone. Copyright is an exclusive right to copy, they don't have to copy it but you that doesn't give you permission. You might refuse to sell something because you're trying to sell something different.

But I'd love to see you trying your pseudo law in court.

[psxphill]

And of course, as in my case, if one has no assets, there is no problem in being sued.

That depends on the country you live in. You could face a prison sentence or fines taken from future earnings. It may also affect your ability to gain employment.

[psxphill]

I'm more oldskool painter and haven't used layers much, but couldn't it be quite useful with 8bits too if you could just draw layers over each other and underlaying layer would just be shown on transparent background color of upper layers? And you could rearrange layer order and enable/disable them.

Layers when using color palettes is still useful, it just becomes difficult to do alpha blending (though there is no reason you couldn't allow it in a limited form).