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Comment by davorak | Hacker News Reader

> adjusting how the website code executes on your computer is copyright infringement.

I would be interested in how German law works to make this so, IANAL but pretty sure USA copy right law does not work that way. Modification for personal use is normally going to be 100% acceptable under USA copyright law. The DMCA Anti-Circumvention is one exception I know to this but it was and is a big deal for being an exception.

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Yes, in the US at least copyright is specifically about reproduction/distribution, not use. This goes to the core of things every HNer encounters like open source licenses vs EULAs for example. A copyright license only governs somebody's ability to legally make copies and reproduce/derive/distribute in turn, not to what use they put it to for themselves. Absent any other contractual agreement they're perfectly free to mark up/modify/cut up a book or painting or the like that they have acquired, and they can sell that specific copy too. But other then the exceptions of Fair Use they can't distribute that work or derivatives without a separate license. Granted, most proprietary software slaps on additional restrictions which sadly have been found legal despite the massive perversion of contract and society it has entailed, but that's not inherent.

One of the things that came out of several Blizzard anticheat/Warden lawsuits back in the day is that, technically, the act of running an executable is copyright infringement, because the data is being copied from disk into memory, into registers and into caches.

Running any software that then does anything with the same memory space (cheating software or, say, antivirus) is another, separate instance of copyright infringement on top of that.

If I own a book I can make as many personal copies of the book I want as long as I keep those copies personal. So it seems like there is more too this ruling than copying from disk to memory or it contradicts typical copyright low or maybe the ruling was about DMCA anti-circumvention?

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