If you saw a fruit stand and it had a sign saying you were allowed to try one grape without committing to buy a bunch, and the owner noticed you were doing anything with grapes other than buying them or trying one, they’d be allowed to ban you from their stand or if they really wanted to be a dick about it, take you to small claims court to recover the cost of any stolen grapes. If the local police wanted to be dicks about it rather than just not show up over something so petty, they could treat it like any other kind of low-value shoplifting and arrest you. The owner letting you have a free evaluation grape doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want with grapes, whether or not you invent loopholes like claiming you’re a different customer if you walk away from the grapes and come back again or that it’s fine as long as you ony take one grape from each bunch or that it should be fine as long as you pretend you’re evaluating the grapes even though it’s obvious that you were never going to actually buy grapes. They are not your grapes until you’ve paid for them, and while they’re not your grapes, what the shopkeeper says is allowed is what’s allowed, and it’s up to their sole discretion whether you’re taking the piss and need to stop.

If you ask a random person off the street or on social media, they might well agree with you that making a link publicly available means it’s legal to download the linked thing, but that doesn’t mean that they’re right. If you read the text of the DMCA (or equivalent in another country), ask a lawyer, or read a summery in plain English of the DMCA written by a lawyer, it’s really clear that, barring some very specific exceptions, you have no rights to do anything with anything unless either you’re the copyright holder, you’ve been granted a licence to do specific things by the copyright holder, or you’ve bought a copy from the copyright holder and have implicit rights to do things with the copy you’ve bought (which is why, typically, software is sold as a licence, not a copy, as that stops you getting your implicit First Sale Doctrine rights). A lawyer would tell you that Microsoft haven’t granted you, as someone who is not evaluating whether to deploy Windows 11 IoT LTSC for a specific project, permission to download the ISO, so you don’t have permission to download the ISO.

The fact that you mention DMCA takedown requests here shows a serious misconception about what the DMCA is and how it works, because they’re a very specific and minor part of the DMCA that has no relevance to normal people. Takedown requests are a mechanism between copyright holders and online service providers when the service provider is hosting infringing content on behalf of someone else, without necessarily knowing that it’s infringing, and the DMCA introduced them because previously your ISP and any websites you visited were also liable for any crimes you comitted using their services. The person downloading the Windows ISO isn’t an online service provider, so the consequences for them wouldn’t be a takedown request. There are much more exciting consequences for normal people, like unlimited fines and jail sentences.

The fact that the DMCA is so broadly overreaching and draconian that it’s impossible to enforce, and that therefore you don’t need to worry about only breaking the law a little bit as no one’s going to care doesn’t mean that what it says isn’t the law. Plenty of people who’ve ended up in trouble for something else have ended up prosecuted for various copyright offences that were easier to make stick than whatever painted a target on their back in the first place.

Despite it not being a problem for normal people, if you’re a big company with enough money to be worth going after, minor things like getting a Windows ISO from the wrong link can cause trouble. Generally, companies have learned that it’s bad for business to sue their customers, but it’s still worth their while to add on extra fees and charges for breaches of contract as long as they’re not so big that the customer bothers disputing them. To avoid these problems, large companies have compliance departments, and they’ll absolutely discipline employees for doing things like downloading things from the wrong link that wouldn’t matter at all for a home user.

I’m still replying because you keep responding with misconceptions and general nonsense and asserting that it’s factual. That’s enough of a reason on its own when the topic’s something as objective as what the law as written is. It should be obvious from the number of times I’ve said that the law is dumb, draconian and overreaching that I’m in favour of it changing, and that would require more people to know that the law is dumb and makes things illegal that no one would expect to be legal. However, a lot of your last few posts has basically been th