BTW, related to recent troubles of Pstermarie and TAD to get permissions from old and inactive authors, what if we had decide that anything older 5+ years that has no explicit permissions written is considered to be the abadonware?
I know where you're coming from, but, in practice, it wouldn't change anything.
Setting aside the legal issues (about which we can make no unilateral decisions), the practical questions are about risk. Might usage harm our reputation? Might the author object retrospectively, possibly demanding removal that harms multiple projects?
In my humble opinion, those risks are already acceptably small if we follow the existing guidelines (as interpreted by the new Vault), which I outlined in post #2.
Professionals measure risk in terms of both probability and impact. Of course, nothing we ever do is risk-free; the point is to reduce the problem to manageable proportions.
Regarding probability, we saw recently that even when we have legal permission (e.g. Creative Commons license), the author may still feel entitled to make waves, and, clearly, legacy material with no explicit terms might be disputed, in theory. However, that's arguably such an infrequent problem that we can deal with it case-by-case (even if it does mean content-ripping once in a blue moon).
As for the impact, we should perhaps be more careful about things which are relatively difficult to replace, such as tile sets and scripts (which might be another reason for not including them in CEP).
