SOPA and abandonware
 

I would like to know since I live in the US how a bill like SOPA will affect people in the US that download abandonware. I know that nobody owns the rights but anybody that know how the US government works that they will find a reason to tke it down. Just I hope that any other bill that is like SOPA does not stop people from downloading abandonware.

As for and abandware and ownership. I'm under the impression the "previous" owners never gave up on their ownership. They are still the "current" owners. What they have abandoned is an active interest in owning the games. That can change back at any time and the only reason they don't shoot us with big, loud guns is that well, they don't care what happen to the games or who get them for free (and technically very illegal)... for now.

That doesn't necessarily apply everywhere, since many of the companies which owned the games back then are defunct now. In some cases the rights to the games have been transferred to another companies (those bought and reserved their rights on them), in other cases the games haven been left without any copyright and trademark holder and can be considered as 'truly' abandoned now.
Most games do have a company though, which holds it's rights to them. Just not not caring to enforce them anymore, as Mighty Midget wrote. But there's never a 100% guarantee this won't change in the future.

Money speaks, dog barks as they say. You see, there are people that have so much money (and are so lazy) that they'll just buy an old game they used to play from sites for money (maybe even for more than the original price), even though those do not necessarily worth that much (I believe most of the games here have a sentimental value). Besides I think of abandonware sites as museums which have infinite exact copies of the stuff on display, so I don't think it's sane for a company that has nothing to do with the development of an old game to charge people for playing them. There are plenty of new games to waste money on, why can't they just let these old goodies go? Yeah, money.

It will affect them exactly the same as anything else related to copyright infringements. In other words: No abandonware for US folks.