While researching early magnetic storage around 1980, I've come to ponder if we know of the first piece of software on removable media that employed copy protection?
The Wikipedia article mentions that copy protection schemes became important when software started to be distributed on floppy media rather than tape - yet there's no indication of which piece of software was first to use some sort of protection, if there were some efforts on tape media already, or similar pointers on when it actually started to become a common thing.
In regards to technologies employed, the article outlines that mostly custom loading mechanisms were chosen to prevent data from being easily copied. It would be interesting to trace early efforts, how they transformed and when - for example - off-media schemes like on-paper lookup tables or code wheels were introduced.
Update: This question has already gathered very interesting insights and widened the perspective of how broad the copy protection topic actually can be once you look beyond in-software schemes. So bonus points for pointing out an actual single piece of software per storage media, like "Game X shipped on tape first and used this scheme" or "Program Y came on 8-inch floppies and did that to prevent copies."