Yeah, this is my concern. Or, for instance, it could require SuperFoo watermark detection to run continuously, regardless of whether the encoder output is Supe

Yeah, this is my concern. Or, for instance, it could require SuperFoo watermark detection to run continuously, regardless of whether the encoder output is SuperFoo Codec or something like MJPG. I think it is naive to assume that such DRM will always be crackable. I was at a recent conference on AI vision, and one big (to me) new feature that camera sensor vendors like Sony are advertising are ISP-like features directly on sensor (motion detection etc). At some point, it seems entirely possible that you couldn't even bypass something like this at the sensor level.