Wrong. Photocopying for personal use is legal under fair use provisions. The only reason why it's not legal to do so with DRM-encumbered ebooks is because of the DMCA.
The DMCA forbids circumventing an encryption system. Photocopying the words on an ebood screen would not seem, to me, to be circumvention since the content was decrypted entirely as designed to put those words on the screen.
It might be copyright infringement, but would almost certainly be covered by fair use assuming it was not then distributed to others.
I've never heard of a DMCA case prosecuted against someone who photocopied the screen of a ebook reader. If you know of one, I'd be interested to read it.
> I've never heard of a DMCA case prosecuted against someone who photocopied the screen of a ebook reader.
In practical terms, the DMCA doesn't result in prosecutions of people who break DRM for personal use. It results in the prosecution of people who produce/distribute software that breaks DRM to allow consumers to copy media for personal use, because there is no practical way to find people who are breaking DRM for personal purposes.
I can't speak as to photocopying the screen of an ebook reader since that has never happened (to my knowledge), but here's a similar case:
Blu-ray discs are encrypted with AACS[0]. If someone were to make a program that, in real time, takes screencaps of a movie being played back by a legal Blu-ray disc player and records the audio output from the player, then recombines that fully unencrypted data into a video file also without DRM, that person would most definitely get hit with a lawsuit on the basis of the DMCA.
