Long ago I noticed that open.pm didn't work for this case so I started patching Perl to fix the problem but ran into p5p's insistence that <> must be able to delete files or e-mail /etc/password or whatever else makes absolutely no sense for a file-reading operator to do.

So you might be able to misuse this misfeature of <> with something like:

BEGIN { $_= "<:raw $_" for @ARGV }
[download]

(untested)