What is meant by technological enforcement?

The prevention of IP infringements by technological means is one of the most dynamic areas related to the enforcement of intellectual property rights, in both the legal and technological arenas. Faced with an ongoing period of dramatic commercial losses caused by counterfeiting and piracy as well as IP infringements in general, IP right owners have made, over the past years, vast efforts to develop measures and technologies which aim to protect their products from being copied. Generally speaking, technological enforcement describes the use of technologies for the protection of IP protected products. In particular, such technologies enable the original product to be identified, or, notably in the online environment, prevent copying or other unauthorized uses of copyright protected content. The most common groups of such protection measures are optical measures and, in the context of uses over digital networks, electronic measures, also known as technological protection measures.