> Can you actually call this encryption? It uses encryption to achieve a goal. The word 'encryption' gets used loosely, as both a purpose and a technique. Mo

> Can you actually call this encryption? It uses encryption to achieve a goal. The word 'encryption' gets used loosely, as both a purpose and a technique. More strictly, the early and main use of communication encryption is confidentiality, to communicate between two endpoints so an eavesdropper can't listen. Pay-per-view, DRM schemes and other content 'protection' systems are about controlling the behaviour of the recipient. That's a fundamentally different trust and psychology model. One of the aims is to give something without giving it, to create a rental system out of a distribution system, and so be able to resell the same content over and over to the same customer. However I noticed that the content creators have devised a foolproof and cunning new method of doing this. A friend gave me a USB stick with a bunch of box-sets to watch. I was very excited, and when Saturday night came around I inserted the memory stick and sat down to enjoy my pirated entertainment... About halfway through the second episode the new DRM kicked in. I realised that I'd already watched this entire box set, and then remembered how shit it was. By making it such low quality dystopian Hollywood grist they'd created something so utterly bloody forgettable that my overloaded, aging brain was tricked into watching it again, thus bypassing the need for any DRM.