Here’s a choice nugget from Lawrence Lessig’s book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy:
Second, digital technologies also change how RW [read-write] culture and copyright interact. Because every use of [a digital] creative work technically produces a copy, every use of [a digital] creative work technically triggers copyright law. And while many of these uses might be fair use, or uses licensed, expressly or implicitly, by the copyright owner, the critical point to recognize is that this is still a vast change to the history of American copyright law. For the first time, the law regulates ordinary citizens generally. For the first time, it reaches beyond the professional to control the amateur–to subject the amateur to a control by the law that the law historically reserved to professionals.
This is the most important point to recognize about the relationship between the law and RW culture. For the first time, the law reaches and regulates this culture. Not because Congress deliberated and decided that this form of creativity needed regulation, but simply because the architecture of copyright law interacted with the architecture of digital technology to produce a massive expansion in the reach of the law. (p. 103)