Since the beginning, software works were placed under the protection of Copyright Laws.
If we replace the propaganda term "protection" with a neutral term such as "coverage", this is a true and useful statement--because you said "copyright". If you replace "copyright" with "intellectual property", that would make it uselessly vague. It is a mistake to try to think about "intellectual property", because at that level of generalization one loses all the important details that give copyrights, patents, and trademarks their effects. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3