What's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. The naive reading (as beagle3's store clerk said) would be that it's technology that pro

What's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. The naive reading (as beagle3's store clerk said) would be that it's technology that protects a copy, or perhaps the process of copying. Protection and restriction might as well be synonyms. Unfortunately, you are right: the term "protection" has been routinely used to mean the forcible restriction of competitors from entering a market, as in "protectionism" and "monopoly protection". The common theme here is that someone invented an abstract concept and applied a word to it that got its good connotations from the more concrete things it was usually applied to. Usually you can point to ways in which it betrays the original concept. In "copy-protection" and other kinds of business "protection", the thing being protected is not a business, or people, or property, but rather the ability of a particular group of businesses to make a profit doing what they're doing; the implementation of this "protection" may well involve sending police to forcibly shut down other businesses, arrest people, and confiscate property. For "intellectual property", the "right to the property" that the law enforces is not the right to the material integrity or full usage of anything physical; in fact, it's the privilege to prevent other people who have full ownership of physical objects from using them in certain particular ways. The digital "rights" are roughly the same: the right is not to own and have the full use of some digital object (which presumably means a group of bytes in memory or persistent storage somewhere), but in fact to prevent other people from possessing isomorphic digital objects. The government can invent any kind of "exclusive right to do X", and make the privilege transferable. Then people can buy and sell it. Like taxi medallions. And then people can call it "property", which they "own", and the government "protects" their "right" to it. I think it's a debasement of the terms, which functions (deliberately or otherwise) to mislead the unwary into granting the practice legitimacy.