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Originally Posted by Thurallor
I think the most relevant question is whether the site would be exposing itself to any potential liability by allowing another author to take over maintenance of an abandoned plugin without explicit permission.
And I think the answer is "no". After all, what possible damages could the original author claim?
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I suspect that you're essentially correct that this entire issue is too small scale for any person to sue over it, or any court to be concerned about it.
As for damages - damage to professional reputation obviously comes to mind. Either the author isn't credited, and loses any benefits to their professional reputation that the plugin might bring them, or the author is credited and their professional reputation could potentially suffer due to the new maintainer (which was not agreed upon by the author) not keeping up the same standards that the original author did (which, admittedly, includes inserting backdoors in the plugin).
Renumeration doesn't have to enter into it - as I understand it, copyright infringement has been successfully prosecuted under GNU copyleft (or something very similar to it), despite the lack of renumeration involved in the entire model.