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Originally Posted by Requiem
You might want to read up on what Fair Use actually is, personal use is not included in US copyright law.
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That's accurate in part. Personal use is not included in copyright law, but neither is it excluded by copyright law. Your question, below, can be used to illuminate that.
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My main question; where in this law does it state anything about ever owning the material we buy? Technically we have never owned it, only the paper it is printed on. Therefore there is no material included with a digital file so the actual download is completely owned by someone else.
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In the beginning, nobody owned intellectual property. Then various people began asserting ownership, sometimes in the face of specific laws to the contrary. See the situation in 18th century England, where the Parliament enacted a copyright law under which writings sold by authors to publishers reverted to the ownership of the author after 14 years - and the publishers just ignored it. The publishers simply kept ownership of the property in a sort of early version of DRM - by owning the publishing equipment & acting as a group.
But eventually, the publishers themselves started violating each others copyrights. Mark Twain wrote a book, and it got pirated. This could be done because, in the absence of statutory law to the contrary, intellectual property was still owned by nobody - which means it was, in effect, owned by anyone who could use it.
Copyright law was written to establish some, but not all, ownership rights as belonging to the author. Any right not contained in the copyright law is still owned by nobody/anybody.
So this is why it is correct to say that copyright law doesn't cover personal use - it doesn't have to. Personal use is assumed, if it doesn't violate the specific rights granted to the creator by the copyright law.