10/31 SP Dealing with Easy Duplication and Distribution

It has occurred to me that our society’s inability to figure out how to properly control and govern software and deal with related issues partially stems from how incredibly easy it is to now distribute and duplicate information. Before the introduction of the computer and a text file the fastest way to obtain a copy of a book was to have one literally pressed onto paper from a printing press. These days acquiring a copy of a book is trivial, and even with a primitive network connection the amount of time and energy it takes to distribute it is trivial. The basis of our current law system never needed to take this triviality into account. If someone wanted information, it usually took some real effort to get it. How do you protect something from copy and distribution when doing so is essentially free? How do you properly protect ideas?