> Furthermore, "owning a license" to the work does not give you permission to download additional copies. It only allows you to create archival copies from your existing copy you have the license to. Since you do not have the license to the source of the piece you're downloading, you cannot download it.
You can only make a copy by way of the internet if the copy is of your exact physical thing. It's not, even if it's bit-for-bit identical, so you are not authorized to make a copy of that one.
The law there is admittedly vague about making the copy, but it does not say how the copy must be made. I also don’t understand what you mean by “...if the copy is of your exact physical thing. It’s not...”
If it’s bit for bit identical, and a copy is made over the internet, wouldn’t they have to explicitly forbid the act of copying over the internet?
You continue to not understand what I'm trying to convey.
They explicitly allow you to make a copy of the one you have a valid license to. You do not have a valid license to the copy over the internet.
You do have a valid license to the one you purchased.
If you purchase a game, put it in your cd drive at home, and then dd it over ssh to your laptop in a starbucks, that's fine. You made a copy over the internet of the disk you purchased and thus have a license to use.
If you do the exact same thing above with your friend's machine and their copy of the same game, you no longer are copying from a source you have a license to copy.
It is their copy, they can make an archive, but they can't share the archive with anyone else.
The important thing here is that this is about an item you have a license to. You do not have a license to the pattern of bits. You have a license to a single copy of the pattern of bits on a specific medium that you own by some means.
The law is not talking about a sequence of bits. It's talking about a license. That's why it doesn't need to forbid copying the things you're talking about, or talk about "exact physical thing"... It's talking about the license, which is even more specific than the exact physical thing in some ways.
Does that mean that once you make a copy from a source you have the right to copy from, then you cannot make another copy from that copied source? It doesn't seem like the wording of the law is saying that though...
...all archival copies are destroyed in the event that continued possession of the computer program should cease to be rightful.
This part seems to imply that your rights to the copy are actually independent from the original copy or physical media. It implies that i can have as many archival copies as long as I have the rights, so I can't see why I can't download a copy as long as I don't cease to be rightful in doing so.
