Arguably, the terms "copy protection", "digital rights management", "intellectual property", and probably a lot more that aren't on the top of my head are the result of, to quote the GP, "warping the very language they use to support their point"; but the groups in favor of these things were there first, and so they got to define the terminology that we've all ended up with.
This is probably just me but I think when they re-word things they choose the clumsiest and least-sexy possible words to put into the acronyms. Digital Restrictions Management is not only a mouthful, it's also obtuse and why bother when you could have something cool like Digital Rebel Management?
That being said, if your claim is that the acronyms as they existed do not accurately describe what's going on, I fundamentally disagree. What's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. Protection and restriction might as well be synonyms. What's DRM? It's technology that helps rights holders manage the rights they have to their intellectual property. What's intellectual property? It's like physical property, but it's ideas instead of objects. Intellectual property is never safe from the fair use exception, which is what protects what one might call the "free flow of ideas" and such. It's simply there to protect exploitation for financial gain.
What's copy protection? It's technology that protects against copying. The naive reading (as beagle3's store clerk said) would be that it's technology that protects a copy, or perhaps the process of copying. Protection and restriction might as well be synonyms. Unfortunately, you are right: the term "protection" has been routinely used to mean the forcible restriction of competitors from entering a market, as in "protectionism" and "monopoly protection".
The common theme here is that someone invented an abstract concept and applied a word to it that got its good connotations from the more concrete things it was usually applied to. Usually you can point to ways in which it betrays the original concept. In "copy-protection" and other kinds of business "protection", the thing being protected is not a business, or people, or property, but rather the ability of a particular group of businesses to make a profit doing what they're doing; the implementation of this "protection" may well involve sending police to forcibly shut down other businesses, arrest people, and confiscate property. For "intellectual property", the "right to the property" that the law enforces is not the right to the material integrity or full usage of anything physical; in fact, it's the privilege to prevent other people who have full ownership of physical objects from using them in certain particular ways. The digital "rights" are roughly the same: the right is not to own and have the full use of some digital object (which presumably means a group of bytes in memory or persistent storage somewhere), but in fact to prevent other people from possessing isomorphic digital objects.
The government can invent any kind of "exclusive right to do X", and make the privilege transferable. Then people can buy and sell it. Like taxi medallions. And then people can call it "property", which they "own", and the government "protects" their "right" to it. I think it's a debasement of the terms, which functions (deliberately or otherwise) to mislead the unwary into granting the practice legitimacy.
