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.
A typical crack is likely just a few bytes to change. Maybe in multiple places.
But I could be wrong.
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).