Both C&C and PoP are about 20 years old. If you consider the copyright terms that most pirate parties are advocating, this IP would be in the public ___domain already. The PoP franchise is owned by Ubisoft now, so you really can't make the "starving indie developer" argument in either case.
There is such a thing as Fair Use, and it covers many educational purposes. I think it's absolutely fair to include 15-20 year old content under that. No reasonable person could think he's claiming he invented C&C or PoP, the point is obviously the engine. All he's done is make his tech demos more appealing by banking on people's nostalgia and using a real world example to demonstrate relevance. When a gaming site publishes a "Top 50 Games from the 90s" list, the article also cannot exist without wholesale lifting of other people's IP. The only difference is that they steal a little bit from a lot of people, rather than a lot from just one IP owner. When said IP owner is a giant faceless corporate entity that doesn't pay royalties to its artists, is there really a difference?
I've also never seen anything wrong with abandonware, because it feels like digital preservationism, a volunteer-run cultural library. Companies like LucasArts hoarded their licenses until platforms like iOS gave them an easy way to milk them for more money, again about 20 years later... There wasn't any more creativity involved than what this guy did, and it's very likely none of the people who worked on the originals saw a cent of that money. And let's not forget that it was the efforts of the abandonware community in creating SCUMMVM that made it easy to port these games to modern platforms in the first place.
Copyright exists to encourage and reward the creation of culture, not to protect profits no matter what.
Edit: Come to think of it, I think it's far more disrespectful for Ubisoft to make a new Prince of Persia game with the original title, than for someone else to create a way to play the original in a modern environment and get some exposure along the way.
Who cares how old it is? This is really pretty simple:
a) It's not abandonware.
b) He put ads on it to make money.
Trying to compare what this guy is doing to the communities that preserve abandonware is laughable. Those people spend money out of their own pockets to make old works available for free to the public in their original forms.
There is such a thing as Fair Use, and it covers many educational purposes. I think it's absolutely fair to include 15-20 year old content under that. No reasonable person could think he's claiming he invented C&C or PoP, the point is obviously the engine. All he's done is make his tech demos more appealing by banking on people's nostalgia and using a real world example to demonstrate relevance. When a gaming site publishes a "Top 50 Games from the 90s" list, the article also cannot exist without wholesale lifting of other people's IP. The only difference is that they steal a little bit from a lot of people, rather than a lot from just one IP owner. When said IP owner is a giant faceless corporate entity that doesn't pay royalties to its artists, is there really a difference?
I've also never seen anything wrong with abandonware, because it feels like digital preservationism, a volunteer-run cultural library. Companies like LucasArts hoarded their licenses until platforms like iOS gave them an easy way to milk them for more money, again about 20 years later... There wasn't any more creativity involved than what this guy did, and it's very likely none of the people who worked on the originals saw a cent of that money. And let's not forget that it was the efforts of the abandonware community in creating SCUMMVM that made it easy to port these games to modern platforms in the first place.
Copyright exists to encourage and reward the creation of culture, not to protect profits no matter what.
Edit: Come to think of it, I think it's far more disrespectful for Ubisoft to make a new Prince of Persia game with the original title, than for someone else to create a way to play the original in a modern environment and get some exposure along the way.