"Balance of Power, by Chris Crawford, is considered a computer classic. In it, players control either the United States or the Soviet Union in a geopolitical quest to topple feeble Third World countries, buy allies with foreign aid and otherwise dominate the world.

But the Cold War is long gone, and so is Balance of Power. The game hasn't been available on store shelves since the early 1990s. It's joined the likes of the Zork trilogy, Lode Runner and countless programs that still bring nostalgic smiles to the faces of longtime computer players.

These beloved programs and others, however, live on at 'abandonware' sites. Usually run by computer enthusiasts with lots of time on their hands, Web pages such as AbandonedGaming.com (http://www. abandonedgaming.com), Forsaken (http://www.forsakenware.com), and Home of the Underdogs (http://www.underdogs.cjb.net) allow visitors to download discontinued old software that can't be found anywhere else.

Hundreds of abandonware sites have sprouted up since the movement first began in 1997. For the most part, they offer only games - few people are keen on downloading an outdated version of Lotus Notes or Windows.

There's a catch, though. Abandonware sites are illegal. While software companies may no longer sell the games featured on these Web pages, they still own the copyrights - and will until 75 years after they were released. This has led to a conflict of intransigent parties that Balance of Power fans might find familiar.

'Assuming the software is protected by copyright and you don't have the authority to distribute the software, then you are violating the copyright and breaking the law,' said Keith Kupferschmid, intellectual-property counsel for the D.C.-based Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA).

Abandonware site operators, however, assert that the issue is a little more complicated than that. While the law may not be on their side, they say what they're doing is justifiable.

'At first we really didn't know about the legal implications of what we were doing,' said a co-founder of Home of the Underdogs, who asked to remain anonymous because of potential lawsuits from the software industry. 'Now we look at it as something like jaywalking. A lot of people do it, but it's still illegal.'

'A lot of people' is right - visitors to Underdogs site are downloading an average of 90 gigabytes worth of games a day.

Abandonware enthusiasts argue that since software companies aren't making any money off the old programs, distributing them free isn't doing any harm. Instead, they say, Abandonware sites provide a valuable service by preserving games that otherwise might be fogotten. Software companies could use sites like these to learn more about what consumers want, while programmers could learn a lot from the creativity and innovation that went to earlier offerings.

Many site operators will also remove a game if its copyright holder asks them to - and so see themselves as different from pirates copying and reselling new games.

Nevertheless, industry groups such as the SIIA and the Interactive Digital Software Association, also based in Washington, aren't budging. They cite games like Frogger, which disappeared from the scene for nearly 20 years before becoming a hit once again after being revamped.

In addition, some companies sell the rights to distribute older programs to third parties. Unauthorized sites offering the same games as liscensed progammers could wind up costing software developers money.

'What it comes down to is, it's much better both legally and morally that the software company that owns the copyright have the ability to controll how that software is distributed,' Kupferschinid said.

But the software industry has yet to go beyond sending threatening legal letters to abandonware site operators and their Internet providers.

'We've got our hands full with just regular, run-of-the-mill piracy, so abandonware doesn't make up a significant amount of our cases,' Kupferschmid said. 'If we could ever get done with that, then maybe we'd focus on abandonware more.'

Kupferschmid suggested that abandonware sites contact software companies for permission to become liscensed software distributers - he said they might be surprised at how easy and inexpensive that could be.

Meanwhile, some software authors have aligned themselves with these fan-run sites, making plans to create a game-preservation society that would use donations and grants to buy the rights to old games and keep them available to the public.

And programmers such as Balance of Power's Chris Crawford have even waived their copyrights and allowed their games to enter the public domain.

'It has no commercial value,' Crawford said, laughing, when asked about his1984-vintage game. 'Why not?'

Crawford, who now develops 'interactive storytelling' software in Jacksonville, Ore., said it would have been wrong to hold onto the rights to his creation just in case he decided to re-release it. 'I feel strongly, if we're going to do Balance of Power, I should redesign it,' he said. 'It's a different world, we've got newer machines. Just spitting out the same thing would be dumb.'

Both sides seem to think a detente in the abandonware wars may be too much to hope for anytime soon.

'I see the dilemma, because if I were a company I might be reluctant just give up my rights to something,' said the Underdogs cofounder. 'At the same time, persecuting these people who really aren't doing it for their own benefit is a real waste of time' " (William Drozdiak, The Washington Post, March 16, 2001).