Are the DOS games on the Internet Archive legal?

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Recently major websites like PC Gamer reported that many more DOS games have been added to the Internet Archive. I was just wondering if games in that archive were legal copies or if many were affectively pirated copies.

 

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I would say that it is not legal. However a lot of it is so old the owners either wont notice or wont care.

As far as I'm aware, most of the games on there are classed as abandonware. So technically they're illegal but, as above, the licence holders most likely don't care anymore.

In the collection there are games like; Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Heretic, Rise of The Triad, Hocus Pocus, all of which are still sold on GOG, Steam... Some of which even seem to have ISOs included, and if you take Duke Nukem 3D for example the .GRP hash matches the one found on the GOG version.

 

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I'm sure someone does care about some of the games where the full version is available, Duke Nukem 3D for example. I'm not asking this because I want to get free games, its more of the fact that I paid for some of these games and am quite annoyed that major sites like PC Gamer are promoting sites which are in affect piracy sites. Its also not that you can just play it in your browser, you can get to download files and play it using the normal DOS Box, or which a source port.