The law provides safeguards and motivation to continue to innovate to the creators in the form of intellectual property rights. We know the results of these laws as patents and copyrights. For computer hardware, protecting these rights from most of us is easy. Hardware involves tangible components that must be manufactured. Thus, unless you are a manufacturer, it is difficult to abuse the owner's intellectual investment.
Software is often a different story.
Changing landscape . Since the advent of the PC and mass-market software, publishers have dealt with how to enforce their rights. Early on, they created installation routines that hid protection keys within the process. Often software had to be installed and uninstalled with the correct installation disk, a problem when you updated the computer that was being used. Others used hardware keys sitting on the printer port or on a card in the computer.