The concept of copyright made sense under the old technologies because it was practical to outlaw counterfeiting. Suppose, for instance, you decided to counterfeit a best-selling novel. You would need to spend many thousands of dollars to set the printing plates, plus have a printing factory to produce the thousands of copies needed to repay your investment, plus a big distribution network. If the police were at all interested in enforcing the law, it would be only a few days before someone discovered that the book was being counterfeited, and easy to trace it back to the printing factory, and the whole operation would be shut down (and the fellow running it thrown in jail), long before a profit could be made.
With computers and the internet, all that changes. The capital investment to pirate IP property becomes effectively zero, and it is difficult or impossible to trace the source. So copyright laws are simply not practical. It is similar to what happened with Prohibition in the US, it turned out to be just not workable.
With computers and the internet, all that changes. The capital investment to pirate IP property becomes effectively zero, and it is difficult or impossible to trace the source. So copyright laws are simply not practical. It is similar to what happened with Prohibition in the US, it turned out to be just not workable.