Technology

You don’t have any rights to do anything else with it.

That's patently false. At a minimum, I can quote parts of your content, just as you can quote smaller portions of any published text anywhere, you don't have to ask the publisher or author for permission. It's also ridiculous and impossible to control, the content is on my private machine already, how can any law be relevant or exerted upon what I do there? I doubt you're writing this comment on the basis of your knowledge of copyright law.

Incorrect. Your browser made it do that. How that data is accessed and displayed is not controlled by me.

You're arguing semantics that really don't make any difference. The display is irrelevant, because the data by itself is stored on my computer before it is displayed. That data is what you've put up online to be accessed.

Owning the CD grants you a license to the content on that CD. That’s about as good as ownership gets there. They own the CD/license. As long as that CD exists/works. You don’t gain that same right by simply visiting a website.

I fail to see the difference between getting a CD with some data (buying it or being given for free, as e.g. a gift) and being sent some data online for free. More importantly - says who? Does copyright law say this about websites?

If an artist makes a painting… and posts a picture of it. They have no rights to the painting anymore? They deserve no ownership/pay for what they’ve done?

This simply doesn't follow from what I've written. They certainly retain the rights to the painting. Besides, "deserving pay" depends on completely different factors than the ones we're discussing, usually artists sell the actual object, the painting. A digital reproduction is, as far as most people care (I think), merely an informative reproduction, and not the real thing. Stuff that's posted online for free is... free. It wasn't intended to be made money with directly.

Your final paragraph is really confusing me, you seem to be saying that Wayback Machine is also committing theft, which I'm pretty sure is not true (I've followed the lawsuits against IA for a while and don't remember anyone invoking that term). And at this point I don't know what "theft" is even supposed to mean to you or to anyone else, and what was the point of the discussion anyway. Maybe I should reread the whole discussion carefully all over again, but I'm on my phone and it's all giving me a headache.