I think the conundrum of whether pure information can be owned, rather than the physical embodiment of it, goes back a lot further than the introduction of digital technologies. The concept of a licence to use information goes back at least as far as the first use of "letters patent" to assign the rights to exploit an invention (Wikipedia tells me that, in the UK, this was first done in 1449) and I imagine lawyers have been making a good living from intellectual property infringement claims ever since!

That's not to say that digital technologies don't hugely magnify weaknesses in the legal concepts and framework though and, as we all recognise, copyright law is severely tested in a context where copying is very cheap to do. I wonder if one could argue that it was the idea of selling physical copies of music and literature that was the aberration, substituting physical ownership of the media for the intellectual property licence which is what was intended all along?

Your post also reminded me of the legal wrangling around CableVision's cloud DVR service, which I believe was ruled legal largely because they deliberately duplicated the stored media (every subscriber had their own distinct physical copy of each show in the cloud, clearly a poor design decision as it significantly increases costs while not affecting the functionality in the slightest). I don't pretend to understand this legal position, but it does serve to illustrate the difficulty of transferring analogue legal interpretations into the digital world.