hornface

You sound like someone I know who insists that the probability of anything happening is always 50/50, because “either it happens or it doesn’t”.

whose

I think current copyright rules are already quite wild enough when applied to digital media, since digital media is literally just made of numbers. Anyone who makes IP automatically owns the number that represents it in a computer.

Plus it’s not just that one number. What if you have different resolutions of an image or video? Different file formats or encodings? What if you compress or encrypt the media? Yeah, the copyright holder can enforce that nobody is allowed to use ANY of those numbers. What if you take media and divide it by 2? Probably still copyrighted. What if you divide it by 236832746589? Copyrighted? Probably, yeah, since it would be too easy to take a movie, divide it by that number, and give it to all your friends so they could reproduce the original. I don’t even know how to estimate the extremely vast amount of numbers somebody implicitly owns every time they make any piece of IP.

So yeah, literally illegal to count high enough or perform certain forbidden math.

Not going to argue about whether or not it’s constitutional (because I don’t know), but I just wanted to point out that this case is slightly more complicated than just “you’re not allowed to purchase”. It’s “you’re not allowed to purchase… BUT other people are”. Which means it’s potentially a question of discrimination, which is maybe not as cut-and-dry as a “normal” law banning a substance across the board.

“if and only if” is an unusual and sometimes confusing way to say it, but the words do directly imply the technical definition.

“it’s an apple if and only if it’s a fruit” literally means “it’s an apple if it’s a fruit” and “it’s an apple only if it’s a fruit”. You already seem to understand the 2nd part, so no need to explain that.

The first part is a bit confusing because the words are in the reverse order compared to how people normally talk. “it’s an apple if it’s a fruit” means the same thing as “if it’s a fruit, then it’s an apple”. Clearly “if it’s a fruit, then it’s an apple” is not a true statement, because there are plenty of other fruits apart from apples.