Yes, but in such cases you can also just borrow the entire book, photocopy it, and keep the copy. It's still legal to loan books or have photocopiers, but usin

Yes, but in such cases you can also just borrow the entire book, photocopy it, and keep the copy. It's still legal to loan books or have photocopiers, but using them together without license is illegal. The point is to make it so that the distributors can reasonably argue they are not actually distributing copyrighted material and have made some effort to ensure the recipients have a license to the work, and that there are no reasonable physical prohibitions the law or copyright holders can make to stop this (i.e., banning the sharing of books isn't reasonable -- for the moment.) It's the responsibility of the decrypting party to only decrypt lawfully, just as it's currently with disc copying/ripping. Now, an actual lawyer might obliterate this through some logic I don't know, and/or appeal to "bit color" as others are pointing out. P.S. I do have to admit my idea reminds me of warrant canaries, a "clever hack" around the law that I ultimately believe can't really be lawful. P.P.S. CleanFlicks et al may be relevant case law, as from what I understand they made varying efforts to "ensure" their customers held a license, but were basically still distributing copies of works they didn't own.