Why is it legal to give away for free a physical copy of copyrighted material that you bought, but not a digital copy? After posting this question, another one, more obvious came to mind. If the "first sale doctrine" is a widespread law, and allows someone to give their whole collection of VHS or DVDs or vinyls for free, then why is this rule not applying when it comes to a digital copy? If the first sale doctrine rule applied, then someone who legally purchased thousands of albums and movies digitally should be able to give these files for free to whoever they want.
A frequent distinction between the two situations is that usually, you buy the actual physical thing (DVD, VHS, CD, book, etc.), but for a purely digital asset, you may be only buying a restricted licence to the asset (on iTunes, for example). In the case where you did buy the digital asset (not simply a restricted licence to it), another difference is that the transfer of a physical item does not implicate the reproduction right1 that is given exclusively to copyright owners. However, transfer of a digital asset often does implicate that reproduction right. See Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc.: It is also undisputed that Capitol did not approve the reproduction or distribution of its copyrighted recordings on ReDigi’s website. Thus, if digital music files are “reproduce[d]” and “distribute[d]” on ReDigi’s website within the meaning of the Copyright Act, Capitol’s copyrights have been infringed. It is a different situation if you transfer the actual medium onto which you downloaded the digital content (ibid.): Section 109(a) still protects a lawful owner’s sale of her “particular” phonorecord, be it a computer hard disk, iPod, or other memory device onto which the file was originally downloaded. Notes 1. 17 USC §106 (1) "the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to [...] reproduce the copyrighted work..." This answer assumes US jurisdiction, but Canada's Copyright Act is fairly similar to 17 USC and similar holdings have been made in Canada.
There is something called the exhaustion doctrine that says that once the holder of a patent sells a patented device, they have relinquished control over that particular instance of the patent implementation. Anyone who legally purchases this hardware has the right to run whatever software they want on it, as long the software is otherwise legal (software designed to defeat DRM would be an example of software that is is not legal).
You are not bound by any contract. You bought a physical good that the seller was barred from selling outside of the listed countries by his supplier. You did not enter a contract with the seller's supplier. Let's look the stream of commerce: Supplier of the item (Printing press) offers it. Sale with a sales limiting contract to resellers. Sale by reseller to customer without limiting contract. The first sale doctrine says, that without a form of contract, the rights of the supplier are exhausted in step 2. Even with a contract limiting the reseller's rights, step 3 exhausts any right the supplier has in the item, unless he too explicitly signs a contract. Selling an item in normal commerce is not satisfying this requirement. There already were no rights in the physical copy of the book when whoever bought the book first sold it to the second-hand seller you bought it from, and there can't be any more rights in the selling of this book gained by the original supplier unless he bought the book back from you.
Copyrights, in general, relate to the right of copying or reproduction. Another’s copyright may be substantially violated and causing harm even if one doesn’t monetize on it: A free access to the work of art may mean that anyone who would otherwise pay for a copy or any sort of license will not pay. This is the reason why in most countries torrenting is illegal. The last question is rather difficult to answer in a meaningful way: If one doesn’t get caught ever then one doesn’t get caught; if one does, then he does. I haven’t found the channel through which such unauthorized copies would enter “the public domain” and therefore it is hard to even make a guess on the probabilities of such infringement to be discovered and one getting sought damages on. There are exemptions under “fair use” rights mostly in common law jurisdictions, and there are examples of non-enforcement or decriminalization in certain other jurisdictions under certain conditions. (See also: Is it illegal to infringe copyright if your boss or your client ordered you to do it?)
Copyright law is a country-by-country matter. Most countries are signatories to the Berne Convention, which provides a common framework, but there are still variations, generally in the duration of copyright or the definition of copyrightable material. According to the Hirtle chart, a video game that was first published in Europe in the year 2000 and subsequently published in the United States is still copyrighted in both the United States and whichever European countries it was published in. It is likely to be a work of corporate authorship, so the US copyright will expire on January 1, 2096 (unless a law extending the duration is passed). In the United States, the requirement to register a copyright was eliminated in 1989 as part of the Berne Convention Implementation Act; registration still provides benefits when filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Most European countries eliminated their registration requirements much earlier, if they had them at all: the Berne Convention dates from 1887. Copyright does not simply cease to exist when the owner does, or if the owner cannot be determined. The difficulty of tracking down copyright holders for old or little-known works is the driving force behind orphaned works legislation. There are no orphaned works laws in the United States, and since copyright is country-by-country, European laws won't help you if you're interested in publishing in the US. In order to track down the copyright holder, you'll need to figure out who originally held the copyright (probably the publisher, but it could be either development company, or both, or the game might be a collective work of the individuals who worked on it). If it was a work of corporate authorship, and none of the game-copyright sales mention it, copyright will have been transfered when the company owning the copyright was sold (as part of a general "and all intellectual property" clause).
Primary Theory I suspect there might not be a legal answer to this question. I have always suspected a sort of pseudo-intellectual elitism (or simple preference or carelessness) with passive voice sentence construction in general. I sense license writers have not (yet) escaped this general trend. I would love someone to prove this theory incorrect. But, alas, I doubt it will happen. Alternative Theory But because this is a Law Q&amp;A site, I will advance the following alternative theory. I don't believe it's correct. But I will advance it because it's the only possible explanation I can think of that might be even remotely based on legal reasoning... Maybe they are just basing their construction on the way the law itself is written? For example, if the law says, "Permission must be granted..." Then it would follow that a writer who wants to comply with the law might choose, "Permission is hereby granted..." instead of something like "The authors hereby grant permission..." or, as the OP suggested, "You may..."
At least in the United States (and I'm pretty sure this is true around the world), facts and information cannot be copyrighted. Just because a work is copyrighted, doesn't mean every part of that work is copyrighted, and factual information conveyed by the work is a part which is not subject to copyright. Copyright on a collection of facts is limited to the selection and arrangement of those facts, and only if that selection and arrangement has some bare minimum amount of originality. See Feist v. Rural, 499 U.S. 340. In this case, it looks at first glance like the person who made that site made their own selection of which materials and which sources would be included; the one place where they really seem to have copied their selection is from glass catalogs with datasheets from specific manufacturers, who would have a hard time arguing that "everything we manufacture in this widely-recognized class of substances" is an original selection. What the author of the website has done is relinquish his rights in his selection and arrangement of the data. In some places, there are other rights besides copyright that do apply to databases; for instance, the EU recognizes database rights to protect significant investment in compiling a database of stuff. But the US does not have that concept. For citing stuff, that's not really a legal question, and has more to do with academic standards. Ask your adviser or teacher if you have one.
First, the press release is copyrighted from its inception and may have been work for hire (a close call since you wrote them for an LLC and the LLC had a deal with them). There is a copyright in someone, although the absence of a copyright notice limits the remedies available for infringement. Second, a link is not a copyright violation. Third, copyright protects an exact manifestation of an idea or description of a fact, not the idea or fact itself. Fourth, there are two different doctrines that could protect an exact copy of a press release. One of two doctrines, which applies if the press release has been released to the public, is an implied license. Press releases are meant for the general public and reprinting them when that is their intended purpose is an implied grant of permission. In the same way, if you have an unfenced front yard to a concrete path leading to your front door, anyone who wishes to meet with you has an implied license to walk up to your door and knock. Whether this implied license can be revoked or not is a harder question. The other of the two doctrines, which is not limited to press releases that have been released, is "fair use". In this situation, when the work was short, has been released to others, has limited literary value, transmits unprotected facts relevant to you, relates facts that may also be a matter of public record (the sale anyway), and you aren't trying to profit from the text of the press releases themselves just from the facts that they convey, the case for fair use is pretty decent even though this is a business use. Ultimately, however, to be squeaky clean and avoid litigation, you can link rather than regurgitate the press releases, and can write your own statements about the facts in them from scratch. This information is not privileged or trademarked. If you didn't sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or if they were released to the public, they aren't subject to trade secret protection either. If they were only released to the customer whose sale was involved and there is an NDA they could conceivably be trade secrets but even then the case would be very weak since the information doesn't create value by virtue of being kept secret.