In reality, lawyers quibble about two kinds of copies:
whereas a true copy is an exact duplicate (usually made by some photographic method)
Courts do not usually give credence to either conformed copies or true copies unless the copy is certified by a public official (including notaries) acting in his/her official capacity or is attested to by one or more individuals who each supply name and address.
In my own experience, birth certificates from the county of my birth used to be supplied by a county official as a photostat (true copy) of the original, but in negative form (i.e. the paper is rendered as black and the writing as white), stamped with the official seal. Later, with the advent of Xerox photocopiers, the true copy was black ink on white paper (although the original may have been blue ink.) Most recently, however, the county supplies a computer generated "conformed copy" which reproduces the data as printed characters, no longer true copies of the handwritten original document.
