The idea of trying to control "copies" made sense when you had to have expensive equipment to make the copies and the idea of allowing people to hold control over the new inventions made sense when you didn't have a way for everyone to communicate.
How would you apply this idea to something closer to home ... something like a Bitcoin mining ASIC? Say you are the owner of a fabless ASIC design firm and you've just spent the last 2 years designing the most efficient 16nm SHA256 mining chip. You send the digital design to a fab for manufacture. Should the fab be able to sell copies of your design to a third party? Or worse, manufacture extra chips using your masks and dump them on the market?