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 va

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.