Copyright licensing allows the owner to control how a work is distributed, not how it’s consumed.
First of all, that’s incorrect.
Secondly, by default you have zero rights to someone else’s work. If something doesn’t explicitly grant you rights, you have none. If there’s a law or license, and if it’s applicable to you, you get exactly what’s specified in there.
The “personal use” or “fair use” exceptions in some places grant some basic rights but they are very narrow in scope and generally applicable only to individuals.
I mean, it’s in the name. The right to make copies. Not to be glib, but it really is
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time.
You may notice a conspicuous absence of control over how a copied work is used, short of distributing it. You can reencode it, compress it, decompress it, make a word cloud, statistically analyze its tone, anything you want as long as you’re not redistributing the work or an adaptation (which has a pretty limited meaning as well). “Personal use” and “fair use” are stipulations that weaken a copyright owner’s control over the work, not giving them new rights above and beyond copyright. And that’s a great thing. You get to do whatever you want with the things you own.
You don’t have a right to other people’s work. That’s what copyright enables. But that’s beside the point. The owner doesn’t get to say what you use a work for that they’ve distributed to you.
First of all, that’s incorrect.
Secondly, by default you have zero rights to someone else’s work. If something doesn’t explicitly grant you rights, you have none. If there’s a law or license, and if it’s applicable to you, you get exactly what’s specified in there.
The “personal use” or “fair use” exceptions in some places grant some basic rights but they are very narrow in scope and generally applicable only to individuals.
I mean, it’s in the name. The right to make copies. Not to be glib, but it really is
You may notice a conspicuous absence of control over how a copied work is used, short of distributing it. You can reencode it, compress it, decompress it, make a word cloud, statistically analyze its tone, anything you want as long as you’re not redistributing the work or an adaptation (which has a pretty limited meaning as well). “Personal use” and “fair use” are stipulations that weaken a copyright owner’s control over the work, not giving them new rights above and beyond copyright. And that’s a great thing. You get to do whatever you want with the things you own.
You don’t have a right to other people’s work. That’s what copyright enables. But that’s beside the point. The owner doesn’t get to say what you use a work for that they’ve distributed to you.