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the copyright prevents you from duplicating it

No, it gives the copyright holder the default right (except when specifically waived) to enjoin you from freely making copies via legal action.

It also causes a number of relatively-narrow federal criminal statutes to automatically apply to persons that the feds find to be infringing on the owner's copyright.



> (except when specifically waived)

Realize that it's pretty hard to put something into the public domain... which is why we have all sorts of licenses like Creative Commons to try and work around the holes in the law.


And those licenses, like all elective copyright licenses are specific (and usually conditional) waivers to some of the rights afforded automatically by post-Berne copyright law.

Even the most draconian shrinkwrap EULAs will specifically grant the licensee the right to install (copy!) the software onto a filesystem of their own, and allow for an operating system to read (copy!) the work into memory and page (copy!) it back to disk in normal operation.




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