Those don't exactly come across as authoritative sources. Show me some specific case law and I might start to believe it.

IANAL but, at least as a practical matter, anything along these lines that's done for personal/internal use seems likely fair game. Someone is seriously going to make a case that I can't transcribe a copy of a speech or other recording for my own use?

It's external distribution that gets stickier--especially as you get beyond short excerpts to a full and complete work.

ADDED: And, yes, anyone can sue anyone for anything. But arguments that something could technically be construed as a legal violation even though no one has ever been called on it in the history of the legal system aren't terribly convincing.

> anything along these lines that's done for personal/internal use seems likely fair game

How about students photocopying books?

Universities seem pretty convinced that's not permitted.

It has been some years but I don't remember mine ever having an issue with me copying books I own. They didn't even have an issue with copying books I borrowed, which seems far more suspect.

This article [0] says that, at least here in the UK, it's permitted to photocopy a chapter, or an article, but it's not OK to photocopy a whole library book, even as a student.

They note however that The concept is not defined in the legislation, so they seem to be going by feel really.

https://www.soas.ac.uk/infocomp/copyright/library/photocopyi...

You're allowed to format shift and time shift content that you otherwise legally have access to.[1]

Audible on the other hand is not allowed to sell you a text version of an audio book that they licensed even if they are using a clever way of producing the text version of the book.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

>You aren't permitted to manually copy a book to notepaper, either.

Do you have any case law dealing with personal use copies only? In my mind it is like copying an mp3 file. I can make as many copies all over my harddrives as I care. It is only when I share those copies with others it becomes an issue.

>The whole point of copyrights are, after all, to manage the rights to copy.

While it is named copyright, generally they are applied to distributing copies, not the actual creation of copies. For example, anytime I make a backup of my computer I make copies of all data on it, including many I have no copyrights to. It only would be an issue when I started sharing/selling those copies.

> Do you have any case law dealing with personal use copies only?

I'm afraid not (IANAL), but university text-copying policies seem to assume that personal copies are very much forbidden, for what that's worth.

> While it is named copyright, generally they are applied to distributing copies, not the actual creation of copies

It also covers creation of copies. Unauthorised recording is copyright infringement, despite that it's an act of creation, not of duplication.

> anytime I make a backup of my computer I make copies of all data on it, including many I have no copyrights to. It only would be an issue when I started sharing/selling those copies.

Indeed. That seems to count as fair-use provided you don't distribute to others.