Even when the law has no basis in reality? Windows XP is going to stay in copyright for... how many decades now? Even though it has no commercial value anymore?
Laws which make no sense and have no value to society should be ignored. If software is abandoned, it should be distributed freely.
While the whole OS may be abandoned, parts of it may still have commercial value.
Imagine you’re a subcontractor who wrote, for example, a PRNG driver, and licensed it to Microsoft so they can include it in Windows XP. Does the subcontractor lose their rights to the driver just because one of the OSes happened to become abandoned?
Why would those rights be tied to commercial value at all?
Laws which make no sense and have no value to society should be ignored. If software is abandoned, it should be distributed freely.