Microsoft has made its stand clear. Everything is an economic transaction.

You can't give and receive any information product -- not music, not images, not words, and certainly not software -- without an underlying contract covering what that person may and may not do with it. Without a signed, attached license agreement, every information transaction is either outright theft or part of a conspiracy to commit theft. Anyone who disagrees is either criminally mistaken or a criminal. Microsoft's campaign against free software systems (like Linux, Apache, or anything subject to General Public License) is quickly turning into the first great First Amendment controversy of the 21st century. Of course, the case has been building for some time. Microsoft's software licenses -- those arcane collections of legal mumbo jumbo you must accept before using any of its products -- are now seen as the model for everything you read, hear, or see. Music producers, movie producers, and book publishers want the same rights as Microsoft. They expect to control what everyone else does with their products, to ban derivative works, and to further ban any attempt to get around the "protections" they have created. This stand has been enshrined into law during the rise of the Net, and deliberately so. Backers of the new Copyright Convention say that its purpose is to protect "innovation" by protecting innovators' legal rights, that without these protections, everything would be free and everyone would be broke. Microsoft's legal stance is enshrined in its software, both its client programs (Windows Media Player, Windows Me, Office, and Windows XP) and its network software (Microsoft.Net). Everyone should have the same legal authority over his or her work that Microsoft expects for its work, the company argues, the same power over what it does to people, and the same power over what they do with it.