Can you explain your reasoning in a way that does not also lead to the conclusion that nobody would ever pass a law outlawing the direct sale of automobiles to

Can you explain your reasoning in a way that does not also lead to the conclusion that nobody would ever pass a law outlawing the direct sale of automobiles to consumers? Those laws exist. They have no basis. They are ridiculous. They are nothing more than protection for the business of car dealers, and no claim is even made that they provide other protections to consumers as far as I know. Also, laws are not programs. They do not specify their goals with absolute precision. They are generally broad, and get solidified through established case law. The DMCA is a perfect example. It outlawed 'circumventing copyright protection mechanisms' and did not define what such things were. If I set a single bit in a proprietary file format that I believe indicates content is copyrighted, is that such a mechanism? No one knew. Then came RealNetworks v Streambox. They faced the exact situation I described, a single undocumented bit in a file. Their product provided a capability that was well protected by case law in other situations - they let you schedule recording and time-shifting of streamed video content. You could not copy that content or transfer it to anyone else, it was locked to the machine which recorded it. They won their case. And they won every appeal by RealNetworks. Until they ran out of money. So they couldn't respond to the Nth appeal, and it became established case law by default. A law against circumventing the publishing industry would go the same way. It would forbid authors from directly selling books, music, videogames, and any other form of content they could come up with to consumers. I would hope that this would be seen as harebrained and insane, as it is... but consider the viewpoint of those in office. The Internet is seen by them as a bustling marketplace filled with the rabble. They see the publishing industry (really the distribution industry) as a centuries-old pinnacle of our culture representing a noticeable portion of the GDP. And they see the rabble tearing it down. They have no faith that an entirely decentralized anything can function, it goes against their very nature. They likely see protecting the existing industry as a choice between being a world leader in the publishing market and being worthless chaos bordering on anarchy, sacrificed so a bunch of shortsighted peons could get movies, books, games, music, etc for almost nothing, devaluing the entire market.