I’m also not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing, at least in the US. Downloading/distributing abandonware is still piracy, it’s just much less likely anyone will care.
> Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works
> Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.
I remember The Internet Archive celebrating the fact that the "do not tamper" clause was no longer legal for abandonware (as they host tons of abandonware that has been cracked, e.g. Win 95).
That's not how the DMCA works. Circumventing these measure is completely illegal. It's just that doing it on your own software is very unlikely to have anyone find out.
But it's a problem for researchers, who generally want to publish their findings (or at least was the last time I was really paying attention to the law in the early to mid 00s).
