That's copyright for you. Its purpose has been totally inverted, and now, rather than functioning primarily as the artificial constraint on supply that allows people to market their intellectual goods, it's mostly used by big companies to quash competitive threats and silence dissenters (pretty much what you'd expect from an aggressive speech control like copyright).

Copyright is so ingrained into our assumptions and culture that we almost never think or talk about it, but it's the beating heart behind so much of what drives the biggest companies today.

Consider that massive logistical operations that deliver critical supplies to people across the country every day, like Exxon and Walmart, are rivaled by companies that just print out DVDs. At some point we need to look at this and ask ourselves why these people are allowed to use a strictly artificial, government-granted monopoly to capture returns so disjointed from the social utility they provide, and think about the bigger picture effects of awarding them that excess.

Copyright and the CFAA are a disastrous tag team for online entrepreneurship, and the mechanism by which Google, Facebook, et al enforce their effective monopolies. The CFAA makes it illegal to get content over a network without having permission first, and copyright makes it illegal to load those pages into RAM whether you're authorized to download them or not.

Of course, when Google et al were brought to task for their ignorance of these laws, after dozens if not hundreds of small sites doing very similar things had been mercilessly crushed by the legal system, the judges magically felt that Google's use was "fair" (see Perfect 10 v. Amazon).

IANAL but people grossly underestimate the draconian reach of copyright legislation. And that's not really an accident; media outlets don't want attention on this, because they know if people realized how bad these laws are, their gravy train wouldn't last much longer.