Clearly no system can be perfect, and the same is true of the TCPA. There will be ongoing leakage of digitally protected data. Perhaps watermarking technologies will be brought into play for another layer of protection, but by and large those have been defeated as well. The goal of these systems is to reduce the quantity of piracy and to raise the price, so that we move away from the system today where do-it-yourself piracy is the norm.
Let us suppose that this is the world ten years from now: you can run a secure OS in "trusted" mode and be eligible to download movies and music for a price; or you can run in untrusted mode and no one will let you download other than bootleg copies. This is the horror, the nightmare vision which the doom-sayers frantically wave before us.
The important thing to note is this: you are no worse off than today! You are already in the second state today: you run untrusted, and none of the content companies will let you download their data. But boolegs are widely available. [cypherpunks]
This is all good and well, but there are still anti-competitive and legal issues.
