4 ms·

I always found this aspect of 'copyright' very confusing. I still don't understand the legal basis here.

• kazinator 5y ago
  I don't fully understand it myself, because if you have a copy of the work (e.g. purchased copy of some proprietary software) the entity which distributed that to you was the copyright-holding purveyor. They did the copying, using their reserved right to do so. No matter what yo udo with the copyrighted work, if you're not copying it, you're not infringing on copyright. The idea that your right to have a copy can lapse due to violating the EULA has holes in it, because copyright isn't about the right to have a copy, but about the right to produce and redistribute copies. For instance, on a bit of a tangent here, if you steal a book out of someone's backpack, that is not copyright infringement, and cannot be. You didn't copy anything. The proprietary EULA wants the law to believe that you're stealing if you continue to use the software after violating the agreement. But without connecting that to the concept of copyright infringement, the accusation has no basis, since you're just using what you paid for it. Disassembling a binary executable to understand it is exactly the same as reading a book to understand it. Copyright is made for books and such.