The Internet community gets riled up over companies asserting their rights on Internet (which is odd... companies asserting their legal rights being seen as evil while individuals illegally attempting to assert what they believe should be their rights are forces for good...) but simple fact is that it is damaging for a company to allow theft of their licences to go unnoticed. In case of Abandonware, if it can be proven that a company knew their products were being illegally distributed but did nothing about it then copyright over that particular licence can be lost. The revenues lost due to piracy in its many forms are surprisingly enough, damaging to companies.

I think that it's unfortunate that freedom provided by Internet has lead to such abuse but I can see validity of both sides of arguments. Companies want and deserve their revenue for services they provide. Abandonware infringes on a company's copyright and can lead to them losing their licences if they don't hunt down offenders. The consumers on other hand have to pay increasingly steeper and steeper prices for products, something that is often blamed on increasing rate of piracy, which is blamed on continuous increase in prices and whole thing becomes a vicious cycle. CDs are very expensive if you only want one or two songs off CD, which is where online music stores can come into play. There you can purchase licence to a song relatively cheaply without having to pay a lot for an entire CD you that don't particularly want (and they have added upside of having more of money make it back to artists who created music as opposed to corporations that distribute it).

I guess in end everyone has to make their own decision about where they stand between concepts of 'Morally Correct' and 'Legally Correct'. Me personally, I like to stand a little closer to 'Legally Correct' than most. It's been my experience that 'morals' tend to change and warp a lot sooner than law does, and not always for better. If we restrain ourselves on Internet then maybe authorities won't see need to attempt to restrain us. The freedom that is relished so much on Internet may in fact be increased with just a little self-control.