The technology in question is an example of Digital Restrictions Manag — Digital rights management

"DRMs primary role is not about keeping copyrighted content off P2P networks. DRMs support an orderly market for facilitating efficient economic transactions between content producers and content consumers."

"The development of the Internet has... created significant challenges to any distribution model which depends on scarcity... The financial and skill barriers to making content available globally have simply fallen away... The application of technology to this problem, if it is to be effective, must therefore in some way reestablish a point of scarcity on behalf of the rights holder. However, this raises a fundamental paradox, [which is] the business of publishers lies in providing access rather than in preventing it... Nevertheless, unless copyright is to be abandoned as a mechanism for trading in intellectual property entirely, it will be essential to find an answer to this paradox... They [rights holders] also recognized that those approaches would be ineffective unless the law itself provided enhanced protection for those processes and systems."

"In my opinion, content protection and rights management exist only as vestigial efforts to preserve existing models of content sales for as long as the bulk of the consumer market remains clueless. History has shown every content-protection scheme invented for consumer-grade goods to have almost no impact on piracy, and little impact on casual copying, except when it has doomed the technology carrying it. This is inevitable."

"DRM is used to lock consumers to proprietary technology. It is used to control supply and push higher prices. It is used to undermine practices we have long defined as fair use so they can be shifted to fee-based."

"Most people, I think, dont even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

"We also concluded that any single-machine locks and keys, or special time-out and self-destruct programs, would be onerous to our best customers and not effective against clever thieves. Because we could not devise practical physical security measures, we had to rely on the inherent honesty of our customers."