No, it's also not illegal to train your brain. If you break into a store, and read all the books, you'll get arrested for breaking and entering. Not for reading the books. My (superficial) take on the argument is that they're hoping by saying "it's not illegal to read" no one will notice, and no one will ask how they got into the book store to begin with.
The answer is in the name of the law, copyright, the right to produce a copy. The original, ethical intent behind the law was to encourage people to create things. Someone could invest time and money into creating some art that had value, and then they were given the exclusive right to monetize it for some amount of time. You could create something, and I'm not allowed to copy what you created, and sell it without your permission, preventing me from doing no work but capturing all the money you could reasonably make off your work.
Want to create a song? You're the only person allowed to make, or authorize people to duplicate it. You're the only person allowed to control the supply of your effort. Eventually, the public good, and interest was supposed to take over, because in the end, you're right, it's just information. It was supposed to enter "the public domain" where anyone could freely use it. But then Disney got involved, and now it's a toxified weapon used mostly by unethical lawyers against curiosity.
Our current laws are written to make it legal for you to copy the Quran via your brain — some people learn it by rote and can stand up and speak the entire work from one end to the other. This is intended to be legal. Fair use of the Quran.
I went to a concert recently where someone copied every word and (as far as I could hear) every note from a copyrighted work by Bruce Springsteen. Singing and playing. This too is intended to be fair use.
You can learn how to play and sing Springsteen songs verbatim, and you can use his records to learn to sound like him when you sing, and that's intended to be legal.
Since the law doesn't say "but you cannot write a program to do these things, or run such a program once written", why would it be illegal to do the same thing using some code?
The people who want the law to differentiate have a difficult challenge in front of them. As I see it, they need to differentiate between what humans do to learn from what machines do, and that implies really knowing what humans do. And then they need to draw boundaries, making various kinds of computer-assisted human learning either legal or illegal.
Some of them say things like "when an AI draws Calvin and Hobbes in the style of Breughel, it obviously has copied paintings by Breughel" but a court will ask why that's obvious. Is it really obvious that the way it does that drawing necessarily involves copying, when you as a human can do the same thing without copying?
> I went to a concert recently where someone copied every word and (as far as I could hear) every note from a copyrighted work by Bruce Springsteen. Singing and playing. This too is intended to be fair use.
Only the learning part is fair use. Playing an artist's songs in public does not violate the copyright of the original performing artist, but it does violate the songwriters' copyright, and you do need a license to play covers in public.
What? I didn't know that. Do you have a reference? I'm particularly interested in the origin — is this something that applies to countries with a common law tradition, a roman law tradition, does it originate in one of the copyright treaties, etc. That kind of question.