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Larry Lessig's second newsletter on Creative Commons explains how the importance of copyright saw a paradigm shift with the advent of digital technologies. An obscure law, with very little significance for most people, now directly affects anyone with a PC connected to the Net. Lary writes:

"there has always been proprietary culture — meaning work protected by an exclusive right. And in my view at least, that's not a bad thing either. Artists need to eat. Authors, too. A system to secure rewards to the creative community is essential to inspiring at least some creative work.

But for most of our history, the burdens imposed by copyright on
other creators, and upon the culture generally, were slight. And
there was a great deal of creative work that could happen free of the
regulation of the law. Copyright was important to cultural
development, but marginal. It regulated certain activities
significantly, but left most of us free of copyright's control.

All that began to change with the birth of digital technologies, and
for a reason that no one ever fully thought through.

If copyright regulates "copies," then while a tiny portion of the
uses of culture off the net involves making "copies," every use of
culture on the net begins by making a copy. In the physical world, if
you read a book, that's an act unregulated by the law of copyright,
because in the physical world, reading a book doesn't make a copy. On
the Internet, the same act triggers the law of copyright, because to
read a book in a digital world is always to make a "copy." Thus, as
the world moves online, many of the freedoms (in the sense of life
left unregulated by the law of copyright) disappear. Every use of
copyrighted content at least presumptively triggers a requirement of
permission. The failure to secure permission places a cloud of
uncertainty over the legality of the use...

Now many don't care about clouds of uncertainty. Many just do what
they want, and ignore the consequences (and not just on the Net). But
there are some, and especially some important institutions like
schools, universities, governments, and corporations that rightly
hesitate in the face of that uncertainty. Some, like an increasing
number of universities, would require express permission to use
material found on the Internet in classrooms. Some, like an
increasing number of corporations, would expressly ban employees from
using material they find on the web in presentations. Thus just at
the moment that Internet technologies explode the opportunities for
collaborative creativity and the sharing of knowledge, uncertainty
over permissions interferes with that collaboration."