There, Elsevier organized a roundtable discussion about the Digital future of libraries and brought in four experts to talk about it. Copyright used to be a narrow issue of law, but it is now a broad topic that encompasses law, technologies, business models, and social norms. Copyright and consumers. In earlier times it was accepted by all that there was a private space and a public space and that the rules of copyright were much more liberal in the private space. Now some e-publishers are aggressively seeking monitoring and control of copywritten material at home.
Technological control is a way of protecting a particular copyrighted work.
General-purpose protection is an attempt to embed copyright protection into the fabric of the web. Changing nature of publication is that copyrighted works are moving from the physical world to the virtual world. The stakes are raised when it is possible to effortlessly copy a work an infinite number of times with perfect quality. The consumer doesn't understand copyright. Most problems in copyright that were an issue in the early 90s have been resolved by now, either by law or by social consensus.