I'm sceptical about encryption/copyright protection. As long as you control the machine, there are always ways around it, since the un-encrypted product has to show up somewhere on your computer anyway.

The best solution would be to write your own parser/compiler/interpreter, probably. Which is probably beyond the company that came up with this. And it's still not a guarantee for full code protection.

The only way these schemes can be made practically impossible to work around (for mortals like me, that is ;) ), is by coming up with hardware implementations, so that the data can be encrypted from the content provider all the way through uhm... speaker, processor, soundcard, whatever's appropriate. And even then there are still ways to re-route the signal or grab the memory.

So no, I don't think it's reliable in a technical way. But legally, that's a different matter. You clearly had to break the encryption to get access to the code, so you showed 'malicious' intentions and probably broke the EULA or whatever agreement, too.

IMHO, this is both a technically stupid and morally ridiculous way of protecting IP rights (note: I'm pretty pro opensource software)... But I comfort myself with the idea that it's going to fail anyway.