Intellectual Property

What's wrong?
Ron Rivest asked me, "I think it would be illuminating to hear your views on the differences between the Intel/IBM content-protection proposals and existing practices for content protection in the TV scrambling domain. The devil's advocate position against your position would be: if the customer is willing to buy extra, or special, hardware to allow him to view protected content, what is wrong with that?"
First, I call it copy protection rather than content protection, because "content" is such a meaningless word. What the technology actually does is to deter copying. …