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This article is an oldy but goody about intellectual property law and how programmers, et al, routinely fail to understand it because of a paradigmatic difference in how they view data versus how other people (and the law) views information.

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The CS perspective is correct though. IP law is truly absurd.

Copyright makes the act of copying something illegal. The only thing the bits might give you is evidence of copying. Trying to think about the law governing human actions only in terms of bits unsurprisingly fails.

Isn't it the act of redistributing that's illegal?

Either way its what someone does, not the values of the bits that matters.

No, the copying is illegal as well. It's just that copying without redistribution is typically both hard to catch and not worth the copyright holder's attention.

At least, that's how it is in US law. Details at: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106

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