Can Palladium (TCPA) be defeated? Of course. I calculate that within minutes of it inconviencing anyone with SoftIce, a solution will be found.

As with all "magic bullets", it only hurts legitimate users. Additionally, It gives a false sense of security to content providers and authors.

Prior to the popularity of 3rd party protectors like ASPR and the like, authors would invest time in their protection, coming up with unique and challanging protections. Now they just get lazy, wrap it up, and usually just have a simple "jz BadGuy" protection inside. It's a false sense of security.

Computers do what they are told, and they like '1's as much as they like '0's. Anything more is just marketing hype. Things like a "Fritz" chip can be emulated, and for that mater, you can emulate an entire VM (witness VM Ware and Virtual PC). A "protected" stream of data can be stripped naked of it's armor once the vunerabilities are determaned.

Legitimate users end up not being able to listen on their MP3 players or playing a game on another PC, things they can currently do. TCPA punishes legitimate users without inconviencing too much the pirate.

I predict a new round of tools, eventually point and click tools, will come into existance shortly before TCPA gains any wide spread acceptance.

TCPA fails because it has one fundamental flaw: It poses a challange to human ingenuity. By throwing a gauntlet down to people who understand what computers really are, some of whom are VERY SMART, that challange can't help but not be accepted.

TCPA isn't a challange, DMCA is. Witness DeCSS, something designed not to pirate but to allow viewing on an unsupported platform. Corporate America says "Jump", and FBI agents hop planes to foreign countries to enforce their will on kids. That sucks.

OK, I'm done. TCPA is just a touchy subject for me. TCPA is BAD, but I can't help but be reminded of the "panic" that Y2K presented to people who should have known better. Maybe I'm over confident, but I'll still place my bet on human ingenuity every time.