(This leak doesn't interest me at all, but if ever the source for QBasic leaked, say.. well I might like to read it without becoming a wanted fugitive ;-))
You have to actually show damages, and nobody is going to care about personal research into obsolete software.
However, most games and software come with some form of DRM which you need to bypass to pirate them, and that's often banned explicitly in copyright legislation. It is under the American DMCA laws and, as far as I know, under European copyright laws, but your mileage may vary.
But yes, as far as I can tell, if someone shares their Good Old Games setup files with you and you download them, you're not breaking the law (though the person sharing the content obviously is).
Regardless of actual legality, you can still expect a lawsuit if your company pirates software and defending against that usually costs more than actually buying the software.
See e.g. https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1602...
thoughts on that? It seems that enforcing this against a downloader would require every single piece of media have an explicit limited license for downloading, which isn't practical right now
But again, I don't know the specifics of copyright law where you live. Perhaps your jurisdiction considers the person accepting the offer of an illegal copy to be a criminal as well.
If such a suit were to happen, the argument would probably boil down to where the infringement actually occurred. Does the server infringe when it sends copyrighted material (because that's where the copy is made), or does the client infringe when it requests said material (because they asked for an infringing copy)? Courts might accept both arguments and just decide everyone is liable.
Also all of that is for copyright, which (usually) covers published works. Trade secrets, which cover things not ever intended to be published, would just call both sides guilty of "misappropriating" the trade secret.
Of course, the flip side of that is that anyone who has ever touched the leak is persona non grata in that industry. So if you're interested in learning how QBasic works, and you ever want to touch anything that interprets scripting code, don't touch those leaks.
FWIW disassembling QBasic (instead of obtaining leaked source) would be an absolute defense against a trade secret claim, but in terms of copyright you now have "access", and need to avoid "substantial similarity" in any source code you write. You aren't strictly-speaking "tainted" (clean-room is not a legal requirement), but if someone actually sued you for copying QBasic you'd better have a good legal argument for why every line of your code does not infringe upon the code you disassembled.
Not to take away from your useful points, but that would be quite the case in 2022! :-)
First, I want to be able to contribute code to open source projects, and I feel like seeing some "leaked" code could somehow taint me in a way that makes this more tricky for me.
Second, my employer expects me to act in a manner that reflects positively upon them. I don't think it's fair business dealings to read stolen code from someone who might be a competitor.
QBasic? - Why that modern thing. Just use the proper BASIC: https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC ;)