> I almost get the impression that you don't think the ESA has a legitimate interest in preventing piracy.

Well, there's legitimate and there's legitimate. We're not discussing here whether they should try to prevent piracy, it's whether they should block efforts to get a small temporary exemption related to non-infringing uses of abandoned software put in place for the next three years.

It's frustrating to me that ESA and some of the other respondents here try to bootstrap from a copyright purpose to non-copyright ones. Nothing in this exemption would render infringement legal; if granted, it would just remove legal uncertainty from circumvention for limited non-infringing uses. In that sense, the legitimacy of the underlying copyright concern is kind of irrelevant.