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Originally Posted by Demented
What I'm asking is in what law does it state that it is illegal for me to download or read a copyrighted work that I haven't purchased. People do it all the time by loaning books or watching other peoples DVD's. I understand that it illegal to distribute copyrighted works, but in the act of downloading a book from a file share or whatever, what law am I breaking. Even if you break it down on a purely physical level. The distributor is sending me the bytes and I am saving them. At no point am I 'cloning' the file. As far as I know, the only prosecutions have been targeted at people who made files available for download, not the actual consumer side of the equation. In fact, I've had the publisher give away non-drm'd copies of books such as Elantris with no prohibition on distribution, yet the book is still under copyright and I have no 'receipt'.
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This can be tricky as the law was written for paper and not electronic media. It has been applied to eBooks by stating that reading online is the equivalent of reading a copy your borrowed but download and making a personal copy is a copyright violation because you have a 'permanent' copy of the original. This avoids issues with a cache of the web site and other artifacts of the electronic age of computers. Of course the online copy must have permission to be their in the first place. Libraries are allowed to loan eBooks as they are not permanent. Certainly prosecution has been aimed at uploaders as that is an easier case to prosecute.
Dale