| ▲ | 0xcde4c3db 2 hours ago | |
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding is that you do not own a license when you buy a CD or cassette, you own a copy (strictly speaking, a "phonorecord" in US law). Copyright doesn't regulate the sorts of typical uses that the owner of a copy would engage in, so a license is not required. When you see those warnings on VHS/DVD/Blu-ray that they're licensed only for private home viewing, what they're telling you is that you don't have a license to do anything controlled by copyright such as broadcasting, publicly exhibiting, or reproducing it. Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117). | ||