The problem is that law protects rights of ownership above anything else. If you have a good supply of food, and someone starving asks you for food, it's your right to refuse them and watch them die from starvation, or to ask a price they can't afford. It's -your- food, so they don't have any right to it.

This is somewhat overblown analogy (likely, nobody's going to die), but depicts similar anti-social behaviour in many software manufacturers. When a program loses popularity and reaches stage when selling it just doesn't pay, they prefer to stop making it available in -any- way (leaving everyone who needs it out in the cold), than just to release it for free or pass the rights to someone interested in continued selling it.
So the "community" takes over and spreads the program without authors' consent.
The former behaviour is legal, the latter, not. Both are morally questionable. But in my opinion the former is more so, than the latter. In case the program is not available, nobody gains anything. Authors - no profit. Potential customers - just loss in productivity. If it's released, the authors still gain nothing (may lose some abstract value, like possiblity to bundle it in the future or calculate as added value of the company or so, but more likely they would never profit from it again) and whoever gets the program, gains the ability to use it, profiting from it. "you" don't profit, but the community does... and it just may come back to you, friends from India know the ideas of Karma, but the concept of "better life for everyone -> better life for me" is true.

Greed is such a bad vice.