It doesn't mean that you can legally distribute Abandonware or anything. The DMCA was a ruling that makes illiegal to reverse engineer copy protection. It makes, for example, no-CD patches illiegal, or chipping a console: anything that purposely breaks the copy protection placed on digital media.
What this 'exemption' ruling does is say it's okay to break the copy protection if the machine is no longer available, so the games can still be archived or played - for example it's okay for ScummVM to break the protection on the old Monkey Islands games (if we can actually class DOS-based PCs as being obsolete).
This isn't news though: this exemption was passed in 2003 and has simply been renewed again in 2006 - Gamespot didn't do thier research.
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