"Not only will this kind of thing happen, but it will become commonplace and convenient (e.g. there will be off the shelf CPU designs that support obfuscation).

"Not only will this kind of thing happen, but it will become commonplace and convenient (e.g. there will be off the shelf CPU designs that support obfuscation). Imagine the digital world returning to the guild system — and the beauty of digital technology is that this could happen ridiculously fast." Almost every embedded processor supports this kind of functionality (firmware in embedded flash can not be dumped). Encryption is also common place, as is code signing. I can't see you have much of a argument here, this stuff is already common place and used in addition (and sometimes in place of because it's actually a lot cheaper) software patents.