The 'personal uses' identified in this paper include portability (the ability to use content on multiple devices), excerpting, and "limited relation and interaction with copyright holders." This last is probably the most significant: when you buy a coffee, you don't show identification, you don't sign a contract, and the relationship ends with the transaction. And a coffee is a larger transaction than (would be, in a free market) most purchases of digital content. The report finds, not surprisingly, that "for the most part, the services examined do not accord with expectations of personal use." As though to prove the point, cut-and-paste from this PDF file is encrypted, forcing me to type these excerpts - an annoyance and invasion of my personal use of the content, with a zero increase in security.
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