[dvt]

You're confusing distribution with copyright. Even free flyers or public YouTube videos are copyrighted. If you draw a flyer then I use that flyer as a cover for a book I'm selling, you will likely win in court. (I say likely because it's up to the judge, but there's a lot of case law here.)

> permission you implicitly granted

There is nothing you implicitly grant anyone, except for ownership (which is explicit, because I gave the thing to you).

[munk-a]

If you've been following pop news there's actually a really interesting parallel to this in the lego case. Assuming the legos were consigned, assuming they were physically transferred with the store when the ownership changed, and assuming the new owners or sellers knew or had cause to know that they were consigned goods... the new owners of the store had absolutely no right to claim them as their property. Just because you physically have something it doesn't mean you own it - if you've ever heard that famously oversimplified saying "Possession is 9/10ths of the law" both consignment and distribution with limited rights are cases where we're talking about that last tenth.

[dvt]

Totally correct, though I do think a contract was signed in the LEGO case you're referencing. So "common law 9/10ths" doesn't even come into play here because people signed stuff.