As a kid in 1980s Portugal, I used to go to a store selling software for the ZX Spectrum (which loaded the software from audio tapes) where the guy just had a bunch of tape copiers and would copy the game as you waited. This was in the outskirts of Lisbon, so hardly an out of the way place.
Good thing too - that’s how I got my hands on an Assembly compiler and decompiler (this was before the GNU tool suite) and really started my way into programming.
So it was de facto legal enough that somebody could have an actual store doing it.
Amongst other things it dependend on the country.
As a kid in 1980s Portugal, I used to go to a store selling software for the ZX Spectrum (which loaded the software from audio tapes) where the guy just had a bunch of tape copiers and would copy the game as you waited. This was in the outskirts of Lisbon, so hardly an out of the way place.
Good thing too - that’s how I got my hands on an Assembly compiler and decompiler (this was before the GNU tool suite) and really started my way into programming.
So it was de facto legal enough that somebody could have an actual store doing it.