Sorry but I believe you have the misconception, at least under US copyright law. There's some extra penalties for commercial use, but there is no general fair use exception for non-commercial use (as apposed to say educational use, which does have a general exception). Feel free to cite a statute or caselaw if I'm wrong.
Copyright is about DISTRIBUTION to others. If you never distribute a copyrighted work to another person there is zero violation of copyright
This is why I am not aware of anyone ever being sue or otherwise held to account for DOWNLOADING copyrighted works. They always Sue over DISTRIBUTION. BitTorrent got the tag of "Sued for downloading" but in reality people were sued for seeding, ie distributing. I am not aware of any leecher that was sued.
Similar of Usenet, Uploaders, and usenet providers get sued, but downloaders?
The entire point of copyright is about preventing unauthorized distribution,
Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following:
(1) to reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;
>This is why I am not aware of anyone ever being sue or otherwise held to account for DOWNLOADING copyrighted works. They always Sue over DISTRIBUTION.
So you must have missed all the filesharing lawsuits over the last 25 years. Lots of people got sued for just downloading, not seeding, just downloading.
I followed them very closely, 99% of them were bit torrent and misreported in the media as "downloading" when in fact if you read the actual cases it was the distribution / uploading that was the bases of the case
