Comment by wrs
9 months ago
AFAIK, in the US it’s literally about copying. In fact, case law mostly supports the position that just the act of copying a program from disk into memory to run it is protected by copyright (with some statutory exceptions). (Google “RAM copy doctrine”.)
That’s my understanding as well. Duplicating the bytes of a file when you don’t have the rights to the content is technically infringement and grounds for an infringement claim, and then you have to explain in court why it’s “fair use.”