Quote:
Originally Posted by EatingPie
By US laws, to copy a work without permission is theft. There is not a physical item involved in the case of digital works, but it is, by law, theft none the less.
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And here is where the reality of computing defies the very possibility of adhering to such writing of these laws. It's impossible to even read an eBook without making at least one copy. That's one copy beyond the one you paid for. The fact that the data in that eBook is copied over the internet hundreds of times–literally–before it reaches your device or computer. The fact that simply writing data that comes through your network adapter (of every variety) to the hard drive or other storage devices involves making 3 copies or more, potentially many more depending on how poorly the software involved was written.
For example, the reading of the device bus that is mapped to memory and writing to real memory to process and buffer before then reading from the buffer to copy to the bus for the drive which will then instruct the drive to read from that bus buffer and write into the drive's own internal queue before eventually reading and writing to the real disk is only a minimum of actions for getting a file.
By the time you've received an eBook it's been "copied" hundreds of times.
Then you have to do a lot of all of that again to read that copy. Copy copy copy. That is what you do when you access data in a computer. You copy it over and over until eventually it's interpreted and somehow displayed. In the oldy days of simple terminals, even displaying the simplest possible text involved copying that text from system memory to the video bios, which likely had custom BUS interfaces between it too.
So to sit and vaguely refer to copyright law as written in a digital context is to be as ignorant of the technology and its realities as those who originally wrote the law. Except they didn't use this technology then, even though it largely existed when most modern copyright law was penned, and so they had a realistic excuse to make these mistakes.
Today, these mistakes are being invoked at convenience for rights-holders to take MORE rights than they were ever meant to be granted under the spirit of the original laws. To blindly obey law by the letter is to fail your civic duty of disobedience in the face of irrational and unreasonable law.