[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The question of how to describe the act of obtaining a first digital copy of copyright material without the copyright holder's permission has frequently appeared on Mobileread.

yeah, only about a billion times.

But it's just occurred to me that there might be room for compromise. Because copyright infringement applies to any unauthorised copying. If I buy an ebook, and then duplicate it 1,00 times, I have infringed on the copyright.

Maybe, depends on what you were doing with it.

For example, Amazon's terms of use for ebooks does not grant me the right to make backup copies of content, only "to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content ". (emphasis added)

That's not copyright infringement, that's breach of contract (assuming the terms of that contract were legally enforceable). Violating the terms of use doesn't have anything to do with copyright in this case.

So what's the difference between infringing copyright by burning a copy of a purchased ebook to CD-R for back-up, and infringing copyright by downloading a copy from some dodgy server on the internet?

Neither one of those is direct copyright infringement.

Is it possible to come up with a term for the act of obtaining digital copyright material without payment or the permission of the copyright holder that both groups could agree on, that distinguishes between innocuous copyright infringement on the one hand, and actual theft on the other?

It's not clear that what you are describing above is even illegal. There are lots of scenarios where you can legally obtain digital content without either payment or permission.