For in addition to these protections granted by law, code writers for copyright holders have built technologies that supplement the law. This code adds to the control that copyright holders have over the use of their content. This additional control is facilitated through software and this software is now backed by the force of law. They imagined all this, it turns out, for very good reason. As economists have confirmed, it is not the case that every increase in intellectual property protection always will increase innovation.
Intellectual property is both an input and an output in the information economy.
Raising the costs of inputs can dampen more than incent innovation. What is needed with intellectual property is balance, not extremes. Balance is not found by red-baiting. Those who question the scope of copyright law, those who doubt the wisdom of a world where use is perfectly controlled, those who remind our politicians of the framers' original balance, those who insist on balance those people are not pirates. But to question this radical increase in control over the ordinary use of copyrighted material by ordinary individuals is not to question a resolve against pirates.