Although knowing that System/Mac OS 7.5.3 and earlier have been provided free of charge by Apple for a while now, would OS 8.0 or 8.1 be free 'technically', especially for emulation?

I thought of that since knowing Apple had dropped support for OS 9 over a decade ago, and has moved on to OS X, that OS 8 would be obsolete by today's world standards. In turn, would Apple really care if a person decided to download a copy/updater to use on actual or virtualized hardware?