To -make- copies, not -take-.

And yes. Every photocopy a text book? Ever trace out a comic book panel or other image? Ever make copies of a photo (obviously more common digitally, but could be done in the film age too) that you didn't take originally? I've done all of them, they're all things I'm not legally entitled to do.

France has this notion of private copy, where you can legally copy basically anything you want as long as you keep it to yourself, your family, and maybe some of your friends. Check your legislation. It may allow what you're talking about already. (Though I agree with you even if it doesn't.)

With the substantial limitation that the source must be "legal", i.e. you can't copy something from a torrent for example since it is likely the uploader didn't put it here legally.

Also I think this is a European law.

I'm not even sure the sources must be authorised to publish the works for you to be able to copy it from them without legal repercussion. Our Hadopi law doesn't punish download, it punishes upload (more precisely, the fact that someone uploaded something from your network). Definitely not a lawyer, though.

Since you mention France, what about taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower and publish it on a commercial site such as imgr/facebook/twitter?

I feel like there is a key difference in all the examples people are giving. Taking a picture of a text book for personal use is a only a small part of the complete work closer would be scanning the entire thing. Further assuming you keep it to personal use it's also very different than spreading it to others.

Oh, I didn't say the textbook was -my- textbook. From the library or from a friend, getting the relevant bits we needed was super common, because the textbooks were infrequently referenced and super expensive for many classes.

But, to the OP's point, I totally agree digital changes the equation. But it should also change the law. Theoretically having an img tag that references someone else's site could be thought of as illegal, after all. I'm reproducing the work without authorization, and even making money from it (ad impressions on my site rather than the hosting site), -while costing the original site money- (since they still pay the hosting and bandwidth costs). Digital changed -everything-, because the cost to copy went to 0. The laws have not kept up.

> legally entitled?

When discussing the validity of copyright laws, using legal entitlement as an argument is pretty circular, don't you think?

Some people really don't get the distinction between moral vs legal. I have actually seen a law student say that they were against legalizing pot, because smoking it is immoral because it's illegal. And he couldn't see how that argument made no sense.

While that argument may make no sense to you or me, it makes just as much objective "sense" as any other moral basis. Some people are strict utilitarians, some people have a deontological code, some people's morals come out of a holy book, and some people equate moral with legal. None of them are "correct" or "incorrect," and they absolutely do not make "sense."

The other systems you mention may or may not be arbitrary, but at least they're not circular. The reasoning "It's immoral because it's illegal and it's illegal because it's immoral" is unsound because it's circular. Disagreeing over your base set of axioms is one thing, but circular reasoning is quite another.

Under a circular legal moral system, moral progress would hinge on new understanding of old laws or else nominally morally neutral changes to the law. The other systems more easily promote moral progress via new understanding. Utilitarians can have new insights into utility functions. Religious based morality can have life experience and new cultural understandings influence their understanding and consequences of their basic commands.

It's about circular logic, not moral philosophy.

Everything you've learned in your life, in school or out;

Do you give proper credit to the creator/author/inventor/discoverer of that knowledge, or refrain from using it?

The question isn't whether this happens to be legal or not, the question is whether it should be, and to what extent.

Do you have any example which you were wanting to compare to, or was the question deliberately open-ended?

I sometimes sing songs in front of people.

Are there areas other than digital media where you can make copies so cheaply and easily?

Does that question make sense outside the domain of media?

Yep, entire continents like Australia and North America ;)