In J E Cohen, ‘Pervasively Distributed Copyright Enforcement’ (2006) 95 Georgetown Law Journal (online), the author suggests that:

In an effort to prevent online copyright infringement and protect established business models, the major copyright industries have developed and aggressively pursued a portfolio of strategies designed to implement a regime that I will call pervasively distributed copyright enforcement. These strategies rely on a range of tools including technologies that restrict the range of permitted information use, contractual regimes for authorizing ‘compliant’ implementations of those technologies, legal prohibitions against interfering with the resulting techno-contractual regimes, other legal rules broadly distributing responsibility for policing communications networks, and publicly inculcated norms of appropriate user behavior. In aggregate, they are designed systematically to shift the locus of control over intellectual consumption and communication away from individuals and independent technology vendors and toward purveyors of copyrighted entertainment goods. Some of these strategies have received considerable public and scholarly attention, while others have not. Some are, and are intended to be, highly visible, while others are, and are intended to be, largely invisible to the public eye.

Is this an accurate portrayal of developments? If so, what role does law occupy?